Voip article: Moving Your Telephone Numbers and Setting Up New Lines? - Four Key Points You Should Know

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Moving your office affords a perfect and unique opportunity to re-evaluate how you run your business. It provides a chance to see if your current, or new, telecommunications systems — including your base telephone system, enhancements to the base system, and special voice and data lines — can be utilized in ways that you haven’t considered to move your business strategies forward. Should you use the same types of trunks, or lines, for your telecommunications service as you had at your old location? Or should you take advantage of new types of telecommunications services?

Telephone Numbers and Lines at Your New Location

• Consider the types of lines you want. You may want to consider newer services, such as SIP Trunking (IP Trunking). ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) PRI and specialized circuits are also still very useful, services such as DID (Direct Inward Dial), if you aren’t already using them. With DID each person receives an individual telephone number for voice calls. You can also assign individual fax telephone numbers. There are advantages to this, such as, for immediacy of obtaining faxes, faxes not getting lost at the fax machine, and privacy. You may even want to use DID just for individual fax numbers and not for voice numbers at all. Combining newer trunking and DID may be even more advantageous. Unfortunately, further details on all these and other newer and specialized services are beyond the scope of this article.
• Consider line capacity. Do you know if callers are getting busy signals during peak times of the day, week, or your busy season? Find out for sure. The telephone company will perform a busy line study, typically for two weeks, at no charge. This is a starting point. The best method is to install your own call accounting software for your telephone system. Prices and reporting capabilities vary considerably so don’t necessarily just accept one suggestion from your telephone equipment vendor if your system can accommodate more than just the manufacturer’s software.
• Make sure the telephone lines at the new location are working properly before you move your phone system. Test them out. Verify the termination locations of your telephone numbers with the phone company and your telephone equipment vendor. Verify, check, and recheck individual telephone numbers and their locations, especially for each fax, modem, and any other special devices you have on your system. Verify that the telephone numbers the phone company told you are the telephone numbers that actually ring in to the lines at your new location.
• Make sure the wiring you have installed at your new location is of the proper type and uses the proper connectors for phone (and for data if you are having this installed at the same time). Have your phone vendor who will be moving your system or installing a new system, verify that the telephone jacks are of the proper type. Test all connections before moving your entire office to the new location. If you’re using IP Telephony, you’ll achieve significant cost savings by only needing to have one network installed — the data network — instead of separate networks for voice and data.

Some moves go smoothly. Many, even the best planned, run into glitches. Some companies give planning a high priority. As silly as it seems, some companies plan poorly. Obviously the better the planning, the lower the likelihood of glitches or at least the quicker to fix them.

Ed Mass is President of Mass Strategic Communications, Inc., a telecommunications consulting firm since 1993. Visit http://www.voip-telephone-system.com and http://www.masscom.com for more information. We specialize in Transforming Telecommunications from a Tactical Tool To a Strategic Business Resource. We Integrate Business Strategies with Technology Opportunities.

We act as an extension of your staff. We are business strategists to increase the performance of your company through intelligent and cost effective use of technology.

Specifically, we consult on IP Telephone System Decisions, Service Provider Decisions for Voice and Data Services, and Services Audits to Inventory All Services and Discover Unused Services. We do all this within a framework of Vendor-Neutral Consulting.

Copyright 2006 Ed Mass and Mass Strategic Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you do not edit the article in any way. You must leave all of the links active and include the full author name credit with company profile.