Most states have one city everybody defaults to. Ohio has three that do not defer to each other, and plenty of businesses here sell into more than one of them. That makes a business phone number a market decision rather than a clerical one.
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.
In a lot of states there is one metro that everything else is measured against, and a business number from that metro is read as the state's own. Ohio does not work like that. Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati each carry their own identity, their own loyalties and their own opinion of the other two, and a customer in one of them notices where a number is from.
That is fine when you sell in one place. It gets more interesting the moment your work crosses a metro line, which happens constantly here: a supplier, a trade or a professional practice built in one city takes on customers in the next, and the number on the invoice keeps announcing where it came from.
So before the mechanics, the useful question is not which features you need. It is which market you want a caller to place you in, and what you intend to do about the markets that answer leaves out.
Some of the codes in use around each city, and what a caller tends to read into them.
216 is in use in Cleveland and has been attached to the city for a long time, which is why it reads as the city itself rather than as the wider region around it. For a business selling to Clevelanders, that recognition is the whole argument for a local number.
614 is the long-standing Columbus code, and 380 is in use there alongside it. Worth knowing if you are handed a 380 number: somebody who has only ever dialled 614 may not read it as local straight away, so let the greeting say the city instead.
513 covers Cincinnati and the area immediately around it, and since 2023 so does 283, laid over the same ground rather than splitting it. Both reach the whole of that territory, so a 283 number does the same job as a 513 one with less of a head start on recognition. This is also the Ohio market most likely to have customers on the other side of a state line, which is an argument for not leaning too hard on an Ohio identity in your number anyway.
Not a complete list of the codes in use in this state, and what can actually be issued to a new account is the provider's answer on the day you order. Get the number confirmed before you order signs or vehicle lettering.
This is the decision Ohio businesses actually get wrong, and it goes wrong in the same direction every time. A business starts selling into a second metro, buys a local number there so it looks established, and then has nowhere sensible for that number to ring. Six months later it is a mailbox nobody empties, which is worse than never having had it.
A second local number earns its place when one of three things is true: there is a real office or person in that market, you are running a campaign you want to measure on its own, or a large customer expects to reach a local desk. Short of that, one main number with a recorded greeting and extensions behind it serves every market better, because every caller lands in the same place and is treated the same way. That structure is set out on auto attendant and extensions, and the number itself on business phone numbers.
Worth stating flatly, because location pages tend to imply otherwise. A phone system that runs over your internet connection is not different in Ohio. It is the same service, doing the same thing, as it is in Arizona. Nobody makes a regional edition, and nothing inside it responds to which metro you are in.
What decides whether you are happy is your connection, which is a building question rather than a state one. Voice needs a steady connection more than a fast one, so test with a video call at your busiest hour, from the room the phones will sit in, and judge it on whether it stutters. The comparison against a copper line is on VoIP vs landline.
There is a real no attached to this product, and we would rather print it than have you discover it in week two. None of it is peculiar to Ohio, so we are not going to spread it over four paragraphs: fax traffic that has to keep working, a connection that drops for a few seconds at a time, a landline contract with months left to run, the emergency address on the account, and whatever else somebody wired to that copper years ago. All of it is on the main VoIP guide, and it is worth reading before you order anything.
We hear this often enough to name it: the line has always been there. That is not an argument. If the copper is still in the building because the number on your signage is attached to it, the number can be moved and the reason evaporates. Work through that list honestly, and if none of it applies, the line is a habit rather than a requirement.
Same product, different local facts: which code covers which part of town, when the phone actually rings, and which trades ring it.
Area codes 513, 283.
Business VoIP in CincinnatiArea code 216.
Business VoIP in ClevelandArea codes 614, 380.
Business VoIP in ColumbusNot a problem, but worth knowing about. 380 is in use around Columbus alongside 614, and a caller who has only ever dialled 614 numbers will not immediately read it as local. The fix is free: name the city in the first line of your recorded greeting and put it plainly on your website. After that the code is doing less work than you think.
Usually not. A second local number is worth it when there is a real office, a person who belongs to that market, or a campaign you want to measure on its own. Otherwise you have created a second place for calls to be missed. One main number with extensions behind it means every caller reaches the same tidy system, which is the thing customers actually notice.
No, and it would be strange if it were. The service behaves the same in Toledo as it does in Tucson. What is genuinely local is the code on the front of your number, what that code signals in the market you sell to, and whether your building's internet connection is steady enough to carry calls.
The three guides that cover the decisions on this page in full.
What it is, what it replaces, and where it falls down.
Read the main guideWhat a toll-free number signals once your market spans three cities.
Toll-free numbersThe same number ringing a shop, a van and a laptop.
Virtual phone systemA 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 Ohio 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 80 cities with a page, as ordinary links.
Look at the plans yourself, or tell us which cities your customers call from and who answers today. We will tell you whether a second number is worth having.
