Business VoIP in San Francisco, CA
San Francisco spent decades turning an area code into a piece of status, and then filled itself with people who arrived from somewhere else and never changed the number in their pocket. Both things are true at the same time, and between them they settle most of what a business here has to decide about a 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.
Two codes, one footprint
A business here has two area codes available, 415 and 628, and the useful fact about them is that they are not two places. 628 is an overlay, laid on top of 415 because the older code ran out of numbers to hand out, and it covers the same ground block for block.
So there is no half of the city that is 628 and no half that is 415, and no line to be on the wrong side of. Two businesses on the same floor can hold one of each, and the only thing that decided which is when somebody asked for a number.
Two things follow. Because the overlay exists, everybody here dials ten digits for everything, the shop on the corner included, and has done for long enough that nobody notices. And because both codes reach past the city line and north over the water, a 415 number never proved a San Francisco address in the first place.
Most of the phones here were issued somewhere else
The worry owners carry is that a newer code marks them out as newly arrived. In this city that worry is aimed at an audience which largely cannot judge. San Francisco runs on people who came from other states and other countries and kept the mobile number they walked in with, so a great many of your customers, your staff and the business next door carry digits from a place none of them live any more.
A city where that many phones are out of area does not read codes strictly, whatever people who grew up here believe. What gets read is the first ten seconds: whether somebody picks up, and whether the caller reaches a person on the first attempt rather than the third.
If the number came with the business, find out whose it is
One local piece of housekeeping goes with this. An older 415 number is a thing people here inherit, buy along with a lease, or take from a previous owner on a handshake, and a surprising number of them still sit on somebody else's carrier account. That makes the number borrowed rather than owned.
Read the bill it appears on before you do anything else with it. If the name at the top is not your business, move it into an account you control. That move is called porting and it is covered on business phone numbers.
None of which makes the phone service a San Francisco product
Here is the paragraph that occasionally costs us a sale. There is no San Francisco edition of a business phone service. What you would be buying is software on machines in some other state, shipped with the same feature list to a shop in Ohio the same afternoon it reaches you. The only local ingredient is the three digits at the front of the number, and the sections above are an argument about how little those carry.
The same honesty applies to us, and it is better said than implied. AldoMedia works out of one office, in Buffalo, New York. There is no California address and nobody for you to meet, and setting a phone system up never involved anybody standing in your room. We keep Eastern hours, three hours ahead of you, so we are at a desk while your morning starts and gone before your afternoon ends.
What the technology is, what it asks of your connection and what it replaces are on the main business VoIP guide. The argument about codes that runs the length of this state is on business VoIP in California. Below is only the part that belongs to this city.
A working day that opens in somebody else's afternoon
The clock is the most underrated local fact on this list. A business here that sells anywhere east of the mountains opens to a queue, because a call placed at nine in the morning on the other coast lands at six in ours, and by the time your doors open the other half of the country has worked most of its day. Firms selling across the Pacific get the mirror image, with counterparts wide awake in the middle of the night.
That makes two routing rules worth writing on the day you install rather than the week you get caught. The first covers the hours before you open: send those calls to whoever is already awake instead of into a mailbox, because a caller three time zones ahead has a whole day in which to ring somebody else. The second covers the evening, when the local half of your day is still going long after the eastern half has stopped answering.
The middle is the local part, and it is the loud part, which is precisely the stretch when the fewest people are sitting anywhere near a desk.
Rent is what removed the front desk
The receptionist has all but disappeared from small businesses here, and cost is the reason. Space is expensive enough that very few small operations pay somebody whose main job is answering a phone, and a fair number gave up the office altogether and kept the number. Teams are small and split between home and a shared floor.
That turns the phone from a staffing question into a routing one. Nobody is going to be sitting beside it, so the system has to be told what to do instead: ring two or three places at once, fall through to a mobile, then take a message that arrives as email rather than ageing in a box in an empty room. That is the ordinary condition of business here, not an edge case.
Travel time makes the same point from the other direction. This is a compact city that is still slow to cross, and anybody working on the far side of the water loses long stretches of the day to the crossing. A missed call cannot be fixed by driving back for it, so the call has to find somebody the first time it rings.
The weather here does not stop the phones
Almost nowhere else in the country can say that. No season shuts trade down, so calls arrive at much the same rate in January as in July and no trade gets a winter to catch up on its admin. The wet stretch concentrates a few of them into a hard fortnight of roofs, drains and water where it should not be, and the long dry half of the year sends nothing by weather at all. Fog and an afternoon wind cost people time rather than damage, which arrives as a first hour of callers moving an appointment.
Two reasons to leave the phones alone for now
The usual reasons to stay on copper are on the main VoIP guide. These two belong to this city.
- The connection is not yours. A great many businesses here work inside somebody else's building, lease or shared floor, on internet the landlord or the host provides and controls. If you cannot test it at your busiest hour, and cannot ring anybody who will act when it stutters, you are not yet in a position to put calls on it. Ask who owns it first. If nobody can tell you, that is the answer.
- The line is not yours to cancel. The building stock here is old, and in an old building the copper often carries more than your calls, feeding an alarm, a lift phone or a door entry panel that came with the premises rather than with you. That line may belong to a landlord, and cancelling it is a mistake you make exactly once.
We would sooner lose the sale than move a business onto a connection somebody else controls and nobody will answer for.
San Francisco business phone questions
Is a 628 number a sign that we only just set up here?
Not to anybody who checks. 628 was laid over 415 rather than carved out of it, so the two codes cover the same ground and neither one places a business in a particular part of the city. All the digits really record is roughly when the number was issued. They also land in a city where a large share of the phones belong to people who moved here and kept the code they arrived with, so the reading you are worried about is one your callers are mostly not doing.
We inherited a 415 number with the business. Is it actually ours?
That depends on whose account it sits in, and the answer catches people out. Numbers change hands informally here, so plenty of them are still riding on a previous owner's carrier bill, or a former contractor's. Find the bill the number appears on and read whose name is at the top. If it is not the business, get it moved into an account the business controls before you print it on anything else.
Half our people work from home and the rest are always crossing the water. Where should calls go?
To more than one place at once, which is the thing a copper line could never do. A rule can ring a laptop and two mobiles together, wait, fall to whoever is on call, then take a message that arrives as email instead of sitting in an empty office. Build it around the crossing times, because that is the stretch of the day when the person a caller wants is unreachable and has no idea the call happened.
Still weighing up whether to move at all? VoIP vs landline puts the two side by side, and answering from anywhere covers the part that decides it here, what a call does when nobody is in the room.
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 California 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.
Two codes, one phone system
Tell us how calls reach you now, what happens to the ones that arrive before you open, and who is expected to hear the phone when the office is empty. If the connection in your building belongs to somebody else and nobody will answer for it, we will say so rather than sell you a phone system.