Business VoIP explained
How the calls travel, what it needs from your connection, and the honest no.
Read the main guide
El Paso, TX
Business VoIP in El Paso, TX
This city keeps a clock the rest of its state does not, works in two languages as a matter of course, and shares one area code with a very large stretch of empty country. All three turn up in how a business here answers the phone.
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 code, and most of what it covers is not the city
There is nothing to choose here. 915 is the code for El Paso, and also the code for a corner of Texas big enough that crossing it takes hours of driving through country with almost nobody in it. Two things follow, both worth knowing before you order a number.
The first is that your code cannot place you inside the metro. A caller learns you are somewhere in the far west of the state. Whether you are twelve minutes from them or fifty is not in the digits, and this city stretches far enough that fifty is an ordinary answer.
The second is that the code stops meaning anything exactly where the metro stops being Texas. The built up area carries on over a state line and across a national border, and neither of those places is on 915. A great many firms here sell into all three and think nothing of it. The number is simply not what tells anybody that.
So take the local code if you trade locally, because it still reads as local to the people who dial it, then stop asking it to do more than that. If the people who pay you are spread across the country, a toll-free number sidesteps the question instead. Moving a number you already own has an order of operations of its own, on business phone numbers.
An hour out of step with your own state
El Paso runs on Mountain time. Most of Texas runs on Central. It is a small fact with a long tail, and it is the most common reason a call here goes wrong.
Follow it both ways. A customer in the middle of the state ringing at nine in their morning reaches you at eight in yours, before many local offices have anybody at a desk. A supplier who shuts at five their time shuts at four yours, so your afternoon is shorter than it feels. And any caller who knows you are in Texas assumes Central and is wrong by an hour.
Freight, warehousing and manufacturing push the same problem from the other end. Crossings, dispatch and shift changes run early and late, so calls before opening and after closing are routine here rather than exceptional. A business number that is really a mobile in somebody's pocket handles that badly, because nobody can be on duty for all the hours the work generates.
This is the part a phone system genuinely repairs. The number answers on a schedule you set, in your business name, whatever hour the caller thinks it is.
Four things to settle before you order anything
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Put the zone in the greeting, not only the hours
Name Mountain time in the recording and write it beside the hours on your website. It is two words and it removes an entire category of missed calls and irritated callers.
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Offer the language in the opening seconds
A greeting that starts in English and offers Spanish straight away, or the reverse, is unremarkable here and costs only a second recording. Have both read by people who speak them. A synthetic voice reading Spanish is worse than offering no Spanish at all.
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Decide who takes the early call and the late one
Not who ought to. Who will. An auto attendant that takes a message and promises a callback beats a handset ringing unheard in a cab while its owner sits in a queue at a crossing.
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Ask what happens on a call from another country
Somebody dialling from the other side of the border is placing an international call, and needs your number written in full international form before they can. Your own staff calling out that way is a separate setting, and it is not always on to begin with. Sort both out before the day you need them.
The service is national, and so is the company writing this
Nothing inside a business phone system was designed for El Paso. It is the same product a shop in Ohio orders, running through data centres that are nowhere near west Texas, and there is no border edition of it. Any page implying otherwise is describing its own marketing rather than the thing you would be buying.
AldoMedia works out of Buffalo, New York. There is no Texas office, no van and nobody who can call round. On a phone system that matters less than it sounds, because almost every fault is a setting or a connection and both are dealt with down a line from anywhere. On this product we are a paid affiliate rather than the network operator, which we would rather you knew now.
The genuinely local part is short: the code, the clock, the two languages, and what the internet does at your address.
Heat, dust, and the two seconds a call cannot survive
A web page can lose two seconds and nobody notices. A call cannot, and in this city the two seconds usually arrive with the weather.
Three things test a connection in this climate. Summer heat cooks any equipment left in a back room with no cooling, and a router quietly baking since noon is a router that drops calls in the afternoon. The windy weeks in spring fill the air with dust and take the power with them often enough to plan around. And late summer storms arrive hard, briefly and in one small area at a time, which is the pattern that removes a connection for ten minutes in the middle of a working day.
None of that argues for staying on copper. It argues for a battery backup under the router, for keeping the equipment somewhere cooled rather than in the hottest room in the building, and for making a video call from the far corner of the warehouse before you buy anything, rather than from the office you are in now. The straight comparison with copper is on VoIP vs landline.
Who should not switch, in El Paso terms
There is a proper list of reasons to stay exactly where you are, and it is set out on our business VoIP guide. Read that first. Two of its entries bite harder in this city than in most.
- Your paperwork still moves by fax. Cross border freight, customs and brokerage work is one of the last corners of business where a fax machine is a working tool rather than a relic, and fax tones do not survive being turned into data. If that machine earns money for you, keep a line for it, or move the paperwork off it before you move the phones.
- The person you would forward calls to spends the day close to the line. A handset that close can latch onto a network on the other side without its owner noticing, and a business call forwarded onto a foreign network arrives badly, or costs more than anyone expected, or both. Find out what your staff's phones connect to at the places they wait before you build routing on top of them.
If neither is you, what you are fixing is dull. A call lands at seven in the morning from somebody who rings the next name on the list at five past, and nothing tells them you were not open yet. The rest of the state, a very different phone market once you are a day's drive east, is on business VoIP in Texas.
Common questions
El Paso business phone questions
Is 915 the only area code I can get in El Paso?
For a number anchored here, yes. 915 covers the city and a long stretch of far west Texas with it, so there is no choosing between codes the way there is in the big metros further east. What does vary is which individual numbers a provider has on hand the day you order, so get yours confirmed before it goes on a truck, a sign or a print run. Asking costs nothing. Reprinting does.
Half our callers would rather speak Spanish. What should the phone actually do about that?
Offer the choice in the opening seconds of the greeting, and have both versions recorded by people who genuinely speak them. Then be honest about where the choice leads. Sending somebody through a menu in Spanish and then to a person who cannot carry on the conversation is worse than never having offered it. Point that option at the staff who can take it, even if that is two of you.
Everyone assumes we are on Central time. Can a phone system do anything about that?
It can stop the damage rather than the confusion. Set your opening hours in the system in your own zone so the greeting, the voicemail and the after hours routing all agree with each other, then name the zone out loud in the recording. You will still get calls an hour before you open and an hour after you close, because that is what sitting on the western edge of a Central time state means. The difference is that those calls now reach something instead of ringing out.
The pieces, each on its own page
Worth reading before you order anything.
A greeting for two clocks
The recording that answers the hour before you open and the hour after you go.
Auto attendantOne number, several buildings
The same number reaching a warehouse, a laptop and the front counter.
Virtual phone systemThe website side of the same city is on web hosting in El Paso, TX.
Coverage
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 Texas is one of the darker ones because it has city pages of its own.
- States with city pages
- States with a guide of their own
- The state you are reading about
Every state is linked. Business VoIP by state and city lists all fifty of them, and the 80 cities with a page, as ordinary links.
A number that answers on your clock
Tell us how calls reach you today, which hours you cannot afford to miss, and how many of your callers would rather not use English. If the connection at your address is the real problem, we will say so instead of selling you a phone system.