With the caveat that the situation could change, office vacancies in major U.S. cities appear to be rising. Should that pattern continue, it would tend to confirm the notion that permanent work from home and hybrid work modes could become a permanent reality.
That, in turn, could mean fewer workers in the office at any given time; fewer workers eating in local restaurants or taking public transportation; shopping downtown or parking.
Lower office utilization also implies fewer people using communications and gear at the office; less use of mobile communications downtown and more distributed usage of internet access and applications across metro areas.
Aside from financial pressure on owners of office real estate; restaurant and retail shop owners; transit systems and parking lots, suppliers of business software and connectivity services will see changes.
If network usage flattens in urban cores and increases in suburban areas, capital investment requirements could shift as well. There could well be less urgency for upgrades of downtown cell sites and more diffuse demand for upgrades across broader suburban areas, with fixed network broadband becoming an even more important mobile capacity offloading platform.
Both mobile and fixed network demand peaks for “work” reasons could flatten a bit. App security will be a bigger issue as more workers work remotely, routinely. People might move away from urban cores to outlying areas, again changing the geographies where additional capacity has to be added.
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