VPN does not have to be expensive but it does require a bit of expertise to set up and of course you want to have a decent Internet connection on either end.

We do occasionally have our uses

I also work for a small company. There are about ten people in the London office, me and another remote worker in the UK.

The telephone I have sitting on my desk is a Siemens Optipoint. It is connected directly to the phone system in London and is fully part of it. If I want to talk to my boss I simply pick up the phone and dial her extension, and vice-versa. If someone calls the office and wants to speak with me, the call is simply transferred to my extension by whoever takes the call. If I want to make a call, anywhere, I dial 9 for an outside line and the call is made as if it were from London. None of this costs me anything.

Having remote access to the server is particularly useful; much of our work involves fairly large documents that we work on as teams. I can ow do stuff, and access stuff, when I want and not just during UK office hours (we used to exchange files via email).

The set-up costs are not massive, although they are no insignificant. Much, I imagine, will depend on what telephone/computer hardware is already in place. My system was only put in place a few months ago. We already had a telephone exchange and server. The IP card for the phone system was £800. The commercial-standard router was £150 (re-conditioned, I think). The phone was £150. Paying the support company to set it all up was about 4 grand.

I think it will soon pay for itself.

That all sounds straightforward enough. I'll try it later. Two questions, though. Am I stealing from my employer if I do this? Also, how hungry are TV downloads? I have monthly limits on my uploading/downloading.

Are you stealing from your employer? Well unless they pay for their Internet extension based upon traffic, it shouldn't cost them anything. However you are using their equipment for your own purposes so that might be contrary to their rules. Similarly if you make a personal call from their VOIP you may be breaking rules. Personally it doesn't worry me as for one thing I help set the rules and for another they are getting an awful lot of my time that they don't pay for so my concience is clear.

As for how hungry the downloads are, video is big, probably the biggest stuff you can download at the moment. iPlayer downloads work out at about 10Mb per minute of video, so an hour long show is 600Mb. I don't know what your limit is, I don't even know what my own limit is! But I do know I have not fallen foul of it yet and I am using VOIP at least 5 hours per day, downloading probably 500Mb of video per day and have an open connection 24 hours per day.

Edit: of course I am probably stealing more from my employer by spending time during my working day answering posts on BE

I wouldn't dream of stealing from my employer. I tell them when I use the VOIP to make expensive personal calls.

As for hunger, that might be an issue. My monthly limits are 20G for download and 10G for upload. It gets pricey to go over that, as I discovered a few months back (some local scrote made merry with my unsecured wireless connection until I could get it fixed).

For anyone thinking about replacing their home phone service with voip, there are a couple of important conisderations.

Firstly, voip relies on many things. The household power needs to be on (for the modem and router or pc) and the internet service needs to be working. Any internet or power outage, or equipment failure will mean no phone service...which will probably be at a time when you need it.

Secondly there's the emergency services / caller id issue.VoIP-Blamed-in-Death-of-Canadian-Child-94113

Voip is really more of a complimentary service, I suppose good for people who want to try to save money on their cell phone bills.

Yeah 20G download is a little stingy, I get 60Gb transfer (no set split between upload and download) for $32 per month.

I don't actually use VOIP for personal calls because I have the 1000 minutes free with my Shaw package. However looking at our relative post counts on here I would suggest you may be 'borrowing' from your employer in other ways

Good point, I use VOIP for business, digital phone for normal calls (does require power) and have a mobile phone for emergency. But when we had the big snowfall in May the power went out for 4 hours which meant now VOIP no digital phone and for a period of time no mobile because I assume the mobile towers were also knocked out for a time.

Nah, not really. It's the nature of my job that there are periods of frenzied activity when I work all hours, including weekends, and don't post at all. Then there are periods when little is going on. One of those is now. I've just finished a big consultancy job and am due to start another one next week. The book I'm meant to be writing is on the back burner. Any work hours I spend on here when I'm not busy are more than made up for by the unpaid overtime I do when I am.

That's consultancy for you.

Is Shaw really throttling VOIP or are you running into the 512Kb upload limit on Shaw High-Speed.

For those downloading video on Shaw there are limits depending on which service you have.

10GB/month for Shaw High-Speed Lite
60GB/month for Shaw High-Speed
100GB/month for Shaw High-Speed Xtreme-I

I think those are transfer limits (combination of up and down).

Digital phone from Shaw is supposed have a battery back-up although I have never had occasion to try it out and have no idea how long it's good for in the event of a power failure.

I believe you are correct.

Don't "traditional" phones run off their own power system?

Yes.

That's why one should always have at least one regular plug in the wall type phone in the house.

Cordless phones are useless in the event of a power failure (stating the blindingly obvious).

This also applies if you have digital phone service.