Every other city on this list belongs to somebody else. This one does not. AldoMedia has answered a 716 number since 1999, out of one office in Buffalo, and the phones described below are the ones we watch ring in our own town.
Disclosure: AldoMedia is a paid affiliate of Unitel Voice. If you sign up through a link on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend what we would set up for our own clients, and we say plainly below who should not buy this.
One office, here in Buffalo, and that is all of it. No branch anywhere else, no second address borrowed for a map listing. If your business is across town from us, it really is across town.
Being here does not make us your phone company, though. On phones we are a paid affiliate of the provider rather than its operator, so the network your calls run on is theirs. What our being here buys is a person on the same clock and in the same weather, who has watched local businesses answer calls since 1999.
For decades there was 716 and nothing else, over the city and a wide stretch of country past it. That stopped being the whole story in November 2023, when 624 came into service as an all-services overlay on exactly the same ground. Both codes are current, both of them are this region, and a line ordered here now can come out with either one.
What an overlay does to the digits is more interesting than the old answer was. Two businesses on the same block can hold different codes, because numbers are handed out from whatever is free when the line is ordered rather than sorted by where the desk sits. Read that backwards and the code now says roughly when a number was first issued, not where it is. A long-established shop is probably on 716, a business that ordered its line recently may well be on 624, and neither of those is an address.
None of which the older code told anyone either. Reaching that far past the city line, 716 places you in Western New York and no closer. A shop in the city and a contractor at the rural end of the region publish the same three digits, so if you wanted the code to say you are the near option, it will not. Say the town instead.
What those years left behind is a habit of seven digits. Where one code ran that long, people hand out seven and assume the rest, and the overlay has made that assumption fail outright, because an area with two codes over one map is a ten-digit dialing area for local calls as well as everything else. Seven digits no longer complete a call here. Print all ten everywhere the number appears, and say all ten slowly at the end of the greeting.
If your buyers are not in this region at all, the code is doing nothing for you and a toll-free number is the honest answer. Which one belongs on the van and which belongs on the website is on business phone numbers.
Plenty of businesses here take a steady share of their inquiries from the Canadian side, and to that caller you are not a local number. You are an international call out of their plan. Some plans charge for it, and some block it until somebody turns it on.
Nothing you buy fixes their contract. What you control is whether there is a second way in, and a toll-free number alongside the local one, both landing in the same place, is the usual answer. Ask the provider whether theirs can be reached from that side before you print it. Not every toll-free number can be.
The other half is the greeting. That caller is watching the clock in a way a local one is not, so a long menu costs you the call. One sentence, then a person or a mailbox behind the first choice, which is on auto attendant.
We are local. The product is not, and saying so is easier from here than it would be anywhere else on this site. There is no Buffalo build of a phone system. The same routing moves a call whether the desk is here or in a town in Nevada.
So nothing above is a feature. It describes who rings a business in this city, at what hour and in what weather, which is a fact about your customers rather than about anything on a plan sheet. The mechanics are on the main business VoIP guide, and the wider view on business VoIP in New York.
Weather here is lopsided rather than general. A band of snow can bury one part of the region while another gets an inch and a gray afternoon, so a bad day rarely shuts the whole economy. It shuts the building your phone sits in while the calls keep arriving.
For some trades that is the busiest morning of the quarter landing on the day nobody can reach a desk. Frozen pipes, dead furnaces, ice on a roof. Those callers are not leaving a message and waiting. They work down a list until somebody picks up.
The seasons run the other way too. Landscapers, pavers and roofers take most of a year of bookings inside a few warm weeks, and a phone ignored all winter is not ready for that.
The general list of reasons not to do this, the fax traffic, the contract with time left, the connection that stutters, is on the main business VoIP guide and none of it is local. Two items on it land harder here.
Ice and heavy wet snow bring lines down here most winters, so the power cut that list treats as an edge case is closer to a seasonal certainty. That changes the priority rather than the fix. The rule sending calls to a mobile is not something to get to later. Do it the week you install, and test it in a dull month rather than finding out it was never finished.
What suits a snow region is that staff can answer the business number from a kitchen table. What does not travel with it is the address dispatch is handed, which stays whatever the account says. A number that goes home every time the region gets buried needs that record looked at before the season, not during it.
If what you are weighing is the copper line you already pay for, the comparison is on VoIP vs landline.
There is a second one now. 624 came into service in November 2023 as an overlay on 716, covering the same ground, so a line ordered here can be issued with either code. Holding out for one of them buys you nothing a caller can read, because both sit over the same map and the code hints at when a number was ordered rather than where it is. What you do have to get right is how you print it. Give all ten digits everywhere the number appears, because an area with two codes over one map is a ten-digit dialing area and seven digits no longer complete the call.
Not with what their plan charges them, no. Nothing on your side reaches into somebody else's mobile contract. What it can do is give that caller a second way in. Ask the provider whether a toll-free number of theirs can be reached from that side before you print it anywhere, because not all of them can.
We can sit down with you, and we do. What we will not pretend is that it makes us the phone company. On phones we are a paid affiliate of Unitel Voice rather than the operator, so the work is the routing, the greeting and moving your number without incident, and all of it happens through the provider.
The pieces of a phone system, each on its own page.
The greeting that answers on a storm morning before anybody is in.
Greetings and extensionsOne number reaching a truck, a counter and a kitchen table.
Answering from anywhereFor the business whose callers are outside this region.
About toll-freeEvery city we cover is on our business VoIP locations page.
A VoIP line runs over the internet, so there is no network to be at the edge of and no corner of the country where the service gets thin. That is why this map has no holes in it. The shading is not signal strength, it is how much has been written down, and New York is one of the darker ones because it has city pages of its own.
Every state is linked. Business VoIP by state and city lists all fifty of them, and the 129 cities with a page, as ordinary links.
Tell us how calls reach you today, who answers them, and what happens to that arrangement when the lot is under a foot of snow. We will say whether a phone system is the fix, and say so when it is not.
