As you read this, a week will have passed since cuddly Ken's congestion charge was introduced, and we should be getting some idea of whether it will do anything about the capital's choked roads.

If you ask me, taking people off the roads and stuffing them into the already overburdened Underground is missing the point, like re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The real problem with London's transport infrastructure is the sheer number of people who have to use it every day to get to work. Simply stopping them using their cars isn't addressing this issue.

With the Central Line tube out of action for the foreseeable future, and overland rail services at the mercy of operators whose investment extends little further than re-painting the trains, who would want to come into London if there's the option of working from home? Add the unquantifiable threat of somebody targeting central London with anything from dirty bombs to anthrax, and the thrill of coming into the West End palls slightly.

But if this is the case, why haven't I taken up teleworking from home?

Well, taking some time off for paternity leave a month ago allowed me to see how it would work. With a broadband connection, courtesy of an Alcatel DSL modem and Freeserve, and with Lotus Notes installed on a notebook, it seemed ridiculously easy.

Of course, with ADSL there are no service-level agreements to guarantee reliability, but I've never encountered any insurmountable problems so far, and data transfer rates have been quite good. I mirrored the information I needed onto my laptop, but many companies might not be so happy to see sensitive data accessed like this, and might restrict employee access to information via a virtual private network (VPN). VPNs make it appear that your remote PC is directly connected to the corporate LAN, though data is actually going backwards and forwards through a secure pipe over the Internet.

And this might bring up another problem, which is that Internet service providers (ISPs) are starting to take a dim view of people using VPNs on a consumer service.

Cable provider NTL began this row by complaining about business users working from home and using up too much bandwidth. Part of the company's response has been to impose a 1GB per day download cap on all their customers - with predictable howls of outrage from some militant subscribers.

However, the real sting in the tail could be waiting for IT administrators, who might soon find themselves bombarded with calls for support from teleworkers.

There are a number of things that can go wrong while installing and configuring a broadband connection, and the IT department could end up having to remotely diagnose these difficulties, which is no easy task, believe me.

I can see an opportunity here for Microsoft, with a teleworker edition of Windows, since staff would only need a Web browser, standard office apps and an email client.

Despite these hurdles, coming into central London every day could soon be a thing of the past for many people - unless they would miss that superb pint of Landlord at the Dog and Duck too much, of course.

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