First day of telework

Today I set up my office away from the office, in the spare bedroom of our apartment in Siracusa - although it's pretty much a moveable feast, consisting only of phone, computer and desk.

The communications, after a few false starts, came together yesterday. I brought from home an RTX Dualphone - a cordless phone system that lets me make and take both Skype and landline calls on the same phone set. The "landline" in this case is another IP phone service, Hosted PBX from Primus, a Canadian company.

The RTX base station plugs into the network router. The cordless handset sits in a charging dock that can be up to 50 meters away. The Primus adapter also plugs into the router and then into the RTX base station.

This morning, I temporarily lost the Skype service after taking out the power in the apartment by plugging in a plug the wrong way around and shorting a circuit. (No problem, we found the fuse panel right away and flipped the breaker to turn it back on.) But when the RTX unit came back up, it couldn't immediately get an IP address from the router. I had to reboot the router. Now it works again.

We tried out the Primus service last night in two calls. Fantastic. It was like talking to someone on the other side of town - no noticeable latency, very good audio quality. Our daughter, who is looking after the house, has the use of a Primus IP phone set up in my office. She can, and did, dial four digits - in other words, as if from one extension on a PBX to another - to reach us here in Siracusa.

Last night, Giorgio, our landlord, brought over a small Ikea table, which I set up initially in the main bedroom in a little alcove. But that bedroom is at the front of the house and it turned out to be a little noisy - people talking, motorbikes gunning their engines, impatient motorists honking - even though it's a tiny, narrow street.

On the whole, a good first day. Everything is working as it should, including, miraculously, me.