In our challenged economy, small businesses are constantly looking for ways to reduce their costs. Many are combining offices, or renting spare offices to individuals. Having multiple businesses in a single office can cause phone wars, with competition for phone lines, lack of privacy, and the inability to properly apportion costs.
In the past, a tenant in an existing office could just be another extension on an existing phone system, which caused many of the aforementioned issues, or could have the local carrier install one or more lines just for them, which was expensive. We worked with one such customer last year, who had multiple companies in a single space, each with their own individual phone lines, resulting in very complicated cabling.
Voice over IP (VoIP) can be of great benefit in solving tenant issues. Since VoIP lines are virtual, they do not involve the expense of the installation of a physical line. A single number can scale to handle multiple incoming calls, and mutiple numbers can be used to direct calls without having the expense of multiple lines.
We had this situation occur today with one of our TalkSwitch customers. This company had sublet a single office to an individual, and had let him use their existing phone number and line capacity. This arrangement was causing difficulty for both sides. To solve the problem, we opened a new nexVortex account for the individual, had a new number assigned to him, and set the TalkSwitch to route calls to that number to his phone only, and to only use his number for his outgoing calls. We completed this within a few hours, resulting in two very happy customers.
If no VoIP-capable phone system exists, an inexpensive VoIP gateway could be used, which would allow an analog phone to be used with VoIP service.
[...] Voice over IP ( VoIP ) can be of great benefit in solving tenant issues. Since VoIP lines are virtual, they do not involve the expense of the installation of a physical line. A single number can scale to handle multiple incoming calls, …More [...]