Stay where you are if
- Your connection is unsteady. A call wants consistency rather than speed, and rural parts of the state still have connections that pause for a few seconds at a time. Test at your busiest hour first.
Business phones by state
Business VoIP in New Hampshire
New Hampshire has one area code and a very large metro sitting just over the line. Those two facts together produce the phone question we get asked here more than any other, which is not whether to switch but which number a business ought to be printing in the first place.
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 here it earns its keep
New Hampshire is served by 603, statewide. In a large state a single code is close to useless as a signal, because it covers ground a customer could never drive in a day. Here it is the opposite. The state is small enough that 603 tells a caller something true and useful: you are in New Hampshire, and New Hampshire is a place they can get to.
That is unusual and worth protecting. A 603 number is a short, recognisable identity that people use as a shorthand for the state itself, and it does more work on an invoice than most businesses realise. It is also the reason the temptation described in the next section is a bad idea.
The question everybody actually asks
A great many businesses here sell into the metro across the state line as well as at home. Sooner or later somebody suggests taking a number from over there instead, on the theory that it will read as local to the bigger market.
We would not do it, and the reason is not sentiment. A number that claims a place you are not in works only until the customer looks at your address, and the moment they notice is worse than never having implied it. Meanwhile 603 has an actual meaning that you would be throwing away.
| What matters | A 603 number | A number from across the line | A toll-free number |
|---|---|---|---|
| How a local caller reads it | One of us | Slightly odd for a local firm | Neutral, a bit corporate |
| How a caller over the line reads it | A New Hampshire firm, which is fine | Nearby, until they check | Tells them nothing either way |
| What happens on discovery | Nothing to discover | Feels like a small deception | Nothing to discover |
| Best used for | Your main published number | A second number, honestly labelled | Selling well beyond the region |
If a real share of your work is on the other side, the answer is a second number pointed at the same phones, not a replacement for the first. Business phone numbers covers how that is put together, and toll-free numbers covers the third column.
What does not change at the state line
The service itself. A VoIP account has no notion of which state it is in, and there is no New Hampshire edition of a phone system. Greetings, extensions, mobile apps and voicemail that arrives as email work identically here and in every other state, and any company advertising a service made specially for yours has written a page, not built a product.
What is genuinely local is the pair of decisions on this page: which number you put in front of which audience, and what the phones do during the months when your business is not busy. The mechanics underneath both are on our business VoIP guide.
The season, and what it does to a phone
Plenty of businesses here have a loud half of the year and a quiet one, and the two halves are not the same halves for everybody. Whichever way round yours runs, the phone needs a plan for both.
- Never cancel the number in the quiet half. Cancelling hands it back to the pool, and it may not be there in spring. Change the greeting instead.
- Put the reopening date in the closed greeting. A caller who hears when you are back will call back. A caller who hears nothing will not.
- Point the quiet season at a mailbox that emails you, then actually read it. See answering from anywhere.
- Plan for a storm taking the power out. No power means no router and no phones. A forwarding rule to a mobile, set on install day, turns an outage into an awkward call instead of a lost week.
The greeting side of this is the auto attendant, and it is the cheapest part of the whole arrangement to get right.
Who should not switch
Not every business here should. The general reasons to stay put, fax work, a live landline contract, whatever else is wired to that copper and the emergency address record, are on our business VoIP guide. Here it is usually the connection that decides.
Worth doing if
- Your published number is somebody's personal mobile.
- You sell on both sides of the line and want a number for each.
- Your year has an off season and the phone currently has no plan for it.
- Calls are answered by more than one person, or from more than one place.
- You are paying line rental for a phone in a room nobody sits in.
Common questions
New Hampshire business phone questions
Should I show a 603 number or one from across the state line?
Show the 603. It is a clear, well understood identity and customers on both sides of the line read it correctly. Taking a number from a metro you are not actually in buys you a moment of assumed proximity and then costs you when somebody works out the address. If a genuine share of your work is across the line, add a second number rather than swapping the first one.
Can two numbers ring the same phones?
Yes, and that is normally the right answer to a two market business. Each number can arrive with its own greeting so whoever picks up knows which audience is calling, and both can land on the same handsets and the same people. You print whichever number suits the audience and nothing behind the scenes has to be duplicated.
We are quiet for months at a time. What should the phones do?
Keep the number and change the greeting. A seasonal business that cancels a line to save money in the quiet half is gambling with the one asset customers actually remember. Put up an out of season greeting that says when you reopen, point it at a mailbox that emails you, and check it weekly.
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: New Hampshire has a guide of its own, and the darker states have a page for one or more of their cities as well.
- 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.
Keep the 603 and add the second number
Look at the plans yourself, or tell us which side of the line your customers are on and how your year is shaped. If a copper line still suits you better, read VoIP versus landline and stay put.