Business VoIP in Chicago, IL

Three codes, and the third one you do not get to choose

Chicago is covered by 312 and 773, which divide the city between them, and by 872, which does not. The third was laid over both because the first two ran out of numbers, so it points at no part of town at all.

That split is what makes ordering here different from ordering anywhere else. A city with one code offers you no decision. A city where two codes were laid over the same ground from the start offers you two codes that mean the same thing. Chicago offers both at once, so the number you are handed either places you in half the city or places you nowhere in particular, and which of the two arrives depends on what the provider has spare that week.

Take whichever one you are offered and do not build the greeting or the signage around it. It is also why every local call here takes all ten digits, so print all ten and say them slowly at the end of a greeting. If you already hold a number none of this applies, because you take it with you, which is on business phone numbers.

Two kinds of weather, one power cut

Winter here does not build up, it lands. A hard freeze turns an ordinary week into a queue overnight, and those calls come at night, from people whose heat has stopped or whose pipes have gone. Summer works the other way. A line of storms crosses in an evening, the power goes with it, and everything it touched rings somebody at once.

A phone that runs on your internet connection stops when the power does. That is the honest weak point of the product, and the mechanics of it, along with what a copper line does instead, are set out on the main business VoIP guide rather than repeated here.

What belongs on this page is the timing, because Chicago puts both of its weather events outside office hours. The freeze arrives overnight and the storms arrive in the evening, so the outage and the rush it causes land in the same hours, and those are the hours nobody is at the desk. Set the forwarding rule the day the phones go in, and pick the flat stretch between the seasons to move them, because the week you are busiest is the week you can least afford to be learning a control panel.

The Chicago reason to hold off a while

The general no, the stuttering connection, the contract with months left, the paperwork that still arrives by fax, is on the main VoIP guide and applies here unchanged. Two things are more common in this city than in a newer one.

• Assume the copper is doing a second job. The commercial stock here is old enough that a pair running into your suite was very likely installed for something before it was installed for you, and whatever that was will not appear on your phone bill. What usually turns up is listed on the main VoIP guide. Find out before anybody cancels, because in a building of this age the thing that quietly stops is generally the thing with a legal obligation attached to it.
• The riser decides before the landlord does. In a tall older building what reaches an upper floor depends on what was pulled up the riser and when, and two suites on the same lease can get different answers. Test the connection on the floor you will work on, at the hour the building is fullest.

Distance is worth a thought too. The built up area runs a long way out over flat land, so a caller who says they are just outside the city can be an hour and a half of driving away. If you send a person to a customer, an extension reaching whoever dispatches saves more afternoons than a bigger system does. If what you are weighing is the copper line itself, that is on VoIP versus landline.