Business VoIP in Massachusetts

What a Boston number tells a caller

Boston is served by 617 and 857. The two sit on the same ground, so which one you are offered for a new number depends on what happens to be free the day you ask rather than on which street your desk is on. That catches people out, because they have usually decided in advance which one they want.

617 has been in circulation long enough that people here notice it, and there is no harm in asking whether one is free. There is real harm in leaving the business number on somebody's personal mobile for another month while you hunt for a particular code. We have never watched a customer choose a supplier on the strength of an area code. They choose the one that answered.

If you already own a number, none of this applies. Bringing it across is the normal path for an established business, and the rules that keep it uneventful are on business phone numbers.

A market that crosses more towns than codes

The distances here are short and the town lines are many. A contractor based in one town works in eight. A practice draws clients from a ring of communities that think nothing of a twenty minute drive across three municipalities. One number cannot look like home to all of them, and it does not need to: take the code where your work is densest and stop optimizing. In this state a neighboring code does not read as far away, because nothing is far away.

The exception is a business whose buyers are not in the region at all. Firms selling into other states, and suppliers whose customers compare several vendors at once, are better served by a toll-free front door. What that signals now is covered on toll-free numbers.

You are not limited to one either. Several numbers can point into the same system, so a second market can have a number that fits it while every call lands on the same greeting, an arrangement described on answering from anywhere.

Who should not switch

This product has a real no attached to it, and here it comes up often enough that we put it above the buttons rather than below them.

• The room the phone sits in cannot hold a signal. Plaster, lath and brick beat wifi, and in an old block the front desk is often the worst spot in the building for it. If no cable can reach the phone that decides whether somebody books, fix the room before you move the phones.

The reasons that hold anywhere, a fax workflow, an unsteady connection, a contract with time left and whatever else shares that copper, are on the main VoIP guide.