How can "telecommuting" mean "to not commute or travel"?

Wikipedia describes that telecommuting

… is a work arrangement in which employees do not commute or travel (e.g. by bus or car) …

If you do not commute, how can you call it "commuting?" Where is the commuting, tele- or otherwise? In fact, it's all about not commuting, right?

WP also mentions telework (makes sense) which according to it is not quite the same as "telecommuting."

Etymonline records its origins as

by 1975, as a hypothetical workplace set-up; verbal noun from telecommute. Said to have been coined by Jack Niles of USC.

Solution 1:

Telecommute includes commute by way of analogy, just like the presence in telepresence, the desk in a virtual desktop and arguably, the friendship of a facebook friend.

That is, although there is no commuting in the traditional sense, some of the abstract properties still hold. For example, the person is considered to be ‘at work’, with deliverables and accountability.

Although they don’t ‘go’ to the office in the traditional sense, they still ‘go to work’ in a more abstract sense - one that carries consequences if the work assigned is left undone.

Solution 2:

It’s a portmanteau. When telecommuting you are commuting via the telecommunications network. All your "travel" is done by the internet. No internet, no work (cf no train, no work).

You’re right in that the word "telecommuting" doesn’t literally mean what it means, but it’s much nicer to say than "telecommunications commuting".

Solution 3:

The Oxford English Dictionary describes telecommuting as

The action or fact of working remotely, esp. from home, using telecommunications technology.

Meaning that the 'commuting' is metaphorically by phone, computer, Remote Desktop Connection etc.

You shouldn't take the word 'commuting' too seriously. Telecommuting is just one of those silly coinages that are supposed to be 'humorous' or whatever.

If you don't have access to the OED, here's an M-W link & definition:

to work at home by the use of an electronic linkup with a central office

Solution 4:

You could look a the difference as being that teleworking can be done out of hours at the worker's convenience. For instance the teleworker could be provided with scans of paper invoices and delivery notes and be expected to enter all the information into a spreadsheet by 9:00am the next day. If they chose to do this outside the normal working day, perhaps when their children were in bed, this would not really matter so long as the deadline was met.

With telecommuting there is the expectation that the worker will be available by phone, Skype or other online conferencing facility during normal office hours regardless of their domestic circumstances. If online conferencing was involved there would, almost certainly, be a requirement to adhere to a dress code as well. The teleworker could be working in nightwear or the nude, the boss would never know.

Ultimately the telecommuter has a genuine presence in the workplace, even though that is a distance. The teleworker does not, necessarily, have such a presence.