From PSTN to SIP

I work from home and spend much of the day on conference calls which ties up my landline. This was a problem as I was worried about missing urgent calls from son's school and suchlike. I was considering adding a second line for business when it occurred to me that, as I work on telecommunications, I should try a SIP provider.

Virgin Media is my broadband provider and I currently enjoy a healthy 100Mbps downstream (shortly to be upgraded to 120Mbps) with 10Mbps upstream. Latency on the service is also generally very good. The house is flood wired for 1Gbps Ethernet using several HP ProCurve 1810-8G switches. WiFi services are handled by a 5th generation Apple Airport Extreme.

Following a period of deep research (a quick google) I settled on trialling Sipgate as the SIP provider and ZoIPer Classic for the softphone.

For audio I have been using a combination of a Plantronics Blackwire C720-M headset and a Calisto 835 
for a desk phone.

Everything was up and running in 10 minutes and it has worked well so far.

Future updates will discuss some of the usability issues I have uncovered as I use this setup for work.