If we were still wallowing in the Dark Ages of Telecommuting, Ilaya Hopkins would not look this relaxed.

If it were even two years ago, Hopkins would right now be listening to the interminable whine of her dial-up modem, fuming at the frequent disconnectsâ€"which would have come, inevitably, at the end of huge file downloadsâ€"and using her telephone as a paperweight, since she certainly couldn't have talked on it while she was online.

But that was then, and this is now, so welcome to the telecommuting renaissance. Thanks to new technology, workers like Hopkins are telecommuting in ever-growing numbers.

Today, about 8 million people telecommute full time in the United States, a figure that's expected to grow to about 13.5 million within the next two years, according to research from The Gallup Organisation, of Princeton, and Opinion Research , also of Princeton.

What are the breakthroughs that are keeping all those cars in garages? More robust networks and increased bandwidth are helping workers like Hopkins stay connected. So are a new generation of remote configuration tools and new software utilities.

And the best is yet to come: Wireless connectivity will allow more devices to communicate with one another without cables and regardless of location, experts say, and wireless- enabled cell phones and personal digital assistants with bigger screens will make it easier to fill out an expense report, for example, from anywhere.

Hopkins' Austin, Texas, home office is a good example of the state of tele commuting today. Hopkins tele commutes as a part-time product manager at InMomentum , a consultancy and maker of network connectivity and internal communications products in Palo Alto.

To do so, she dials in on a high-speed cable modem to the company's vir tual private network. Compared with the agonisingly slow modems of yesteryear, using the cable modem is like being on a telecommuting express lane. The connectivity is so good, Hopkins said, it's even "faster than being at the office."

And at telecommuter strongholds such as Nortel Networks â€"where a 5-year-old home-based program has ballooned to the point that it's now supporting 13,000 employeesâ€"supporting teleworkers has been honed to a science. Nortel maintains a teleworking Web site that employees can use to order and set up equipment, voice and data lines, or network devices.

Indeed, new technology is making it hard for companies to find reasons to reject an employee's request to work from home. Telecommuting even works out to an employer's advantage, since productivity among teleworkers is 22 percent to 45 percent higher due to fewer interruptions, less time off because of weather or sick children, and no commuting time, according to Gallup and Opinion Research.

But there's no need to quote figures to Nortel; it's well aware of telecommuting's benefits. Upward of 1,000 employees apply to join the company's telecommuting program each month, according to Vik Muiznieks, vice president of global professional services for the Internet and communications consultancy and service provider, based in Billerica.

That's considered good for all. "Almost everybody wins," Muiznieks said. "Teleworkers have better balance in their work life and home life, [and] the corporation benefits in cost reductions and employee satisfaction."

Last year's annual Nortel poll of employees showed that job satisfaction among teleworkers was 11 percent higher than among the company's general population. The positive response rate among employees who said they felt valued and intended to stay at the company was 16 percent higher among teleworkers. Teleworkers were more willing to recommend working at Nortel, and productivity among those folks who work away from the distractions of the office was also better.

"Those are very solid numbers in terms of growth and acceptance of the program," Muiznieks said. "And in addition to the US$20 million a year we save in real estate costs, it still pales in comparison to what we save by not having to retrain or rehire people, or through losses through attrition."

But even with all the cool new toys, the No. 1 obstacle for telecommuters continues to be bandwidth. So says Erik Beer, a PeopleSoft workstation engineer who develops and maintains an automated process for delivering operating systems, application suites and domain structures for workstations used by the company's 12,000 employees. Of the 12,000 employee systems, 550 to 650 are laptops toted by mobile workersâ€"quite a number of off-site systems to be responsible for.

"From an internal IT standpoint, we are challenged with trying to keep machines up-to-date with the most current drives, software releases, patches, fixes, whatever," said Beer, in Pleasanton. "That's fairly easy to do when your users are in one location on a high-speed wired LAN. But when you take telecommuters and mobile users who are largely using dial-up or 56K bps at best back to the home office, you introduce a whole new aspect."

If it were the Dark Ages, updating and troubleshooting those laptops would have meant two to three days of downtime, since the systems either had to be mailed or driven in to the office, or else an IT staffer, such as Beer, would have to hop on a plane to make a house call.

Instead, he's using PictureTel, a software distribution utility from LANovation that lets users update their systems via email, CD-ROM or the Web. Such products make it possible to send small driver updates and patch files over a phone line without users having to monkey with new installs or configurations. And that saves time and money on the installation end or when users run into problems.

So far, Hopkins hasn't been one of those workers who have had to place emergency calls to InMomentum's main office for technical support. That's not just a relief for InMomentum's help deskâ€"it's a blessing for Hopkins, who has all the more time to gaze out the window of her home office to her backyard. That's no small job benefit, Hopkins said, considering that the imminent birth of her son was what prompted the switch to at-home work.

"I was looking for some alternatives to facilitate coming back to work after my maternity leave," she said. The telecommuting renaissance couldn't have come at a better time.

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