As part of the new home office setup, I decided to run with a SIP phone service from my wireless ISP rather than any fixed-line installation.
I don't want to be tied to a headset, so a real desk phone was the order of the day. Initial trials with a D-Link DPH-120S were disappointing; there was a nasty audible hum coming through, and the unit felt a little too lightweight in construction.
So off to http://nicegear.co.nz and see what they recommend … a SNOM 300 VoIP phone!
This unit feels much more solid on the desk, and has a nice handset too. There was a little bit of trouble getting it set up with WIC, which needed a full factory reset and reconfigure to fix (it looks like the device breaks the authentication hashes under some circumstances, and just re-entering the account details doesn't fix it). However, if this became a problem in regular usage it would be easy enough to use DHCP/TFTP to provide full automated configuration at boot time anyway.
The web interface is nice and comprehensive, and the phone can be configured with up to four separate SIP accounts; so you can separate between business and personal lines, or between incoming/outgoing calls – just indicate which identity you want to use in the address book for that number. Settings are flexible and well documented – in order to encrypt SIP all I had to do was specify ;transport=tls at the end of the Registrar IP address (RTP was already encrypted, thanks!)
As the phone receives calls and other events happen, you can ask it to hit a URL on one of your own servers. This would nicely form the basis of a “stop the music!” on an incoming call :-) Of course, you can also hand off to a syslog server, or query the phone with SNMP.
So, it's a very flexible device, which makes it easy to fit in with however you want to handle calls. Thanks to Hadley of Nicegear for the recommendation and prompt shipping!