Everything worth knowing before you buy a business phone number.

Business telephony is regulated, and a great deal of what is written about it online is copied from other blog posts rather than from the rule. These pages cite the regulator, the standard or the vendor's own documentation for every claim they make, and say plainly when something could not be verified.

Start here

Reference

What is an auto attendant?

The actual definition, how it differs from an IVR, where the press-1 menu came from, and what PBX, MLTS and hunt group mean.

Guide

Designing a menu people do not hate

How many options to offer, whether phones should ring together or in order, what to do after hours, and the mistakes worth naming.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Hardware, porting, privacy, after-hours, emergency calls, toll-free and contracts, including where the honest answer is to buy something else.

Getting a number

Guide

Porting your existing number

What porting involves, the regulated timelines, why ports get rejected, and the one mistake that loses a number permanently.

Guide

Local vs toll-free

How toll-free numbers are actually administered, why moving one is not an ordinary port, and which your business wants.

Guide

Emergency calling, honestly

Kari's Law, RAY BAUM'S Act and the FCC's VoIP rules, and what a call-routing service does and does not change about 911.

Reference

Glossary of phone terms

ACD, DTMF, hunt group, MLTS, LNP, RespOrg and the rest, sourced to ATIS, the CFR and ITU-T where a formal definition exists.

Choosing between options

Compare

Auto Attendant vs Google Voice

Built from Google's own current documentation, including a section on when you should simply stay where you are.

Compare

Auto Attendant vs the VoIP platforms

RingCentral, Nextiva, Ooma, Zoom and the rest, with annual and month-to-month prices shown separately.

Compare

Auto attendant vs answering service

Two products people constantly confuse. One costs several times the other, and for some businesses it is worth it.

Longer research

Long-form articles on business telephony, each with its own source list and a downloadable PDF. These go considerably deeper than the reference pages above.

Article · 26 min read

How to Get a Business Phone Number: Options & Costs

Eight option types compared with real team pricing, plus porting, identity checks and toll-free considerations.

Article · 21 min read

How Long Does It Take to Port a Phone Number?

Porting times from 2.5-hour mobile transfers to six-week complex ports, with US, Canadian, UK and Australian rules.

Article · 24 min read

Google Voice Alternatives for Business: What Works

A comparison by actual constraint, with current per-user and flat pricing, auto attendant fit and country coverage.

Index

All articles

The full library, with tags and a sitemap of its own.

How we source these pages

Every regulatory claim links to the rule itself — the Code of Federal Regulations, an FCC order, Ofcom's conditions, a CRTC decision — rather than to an article about the rule. Every price links to the vendor's own pricing page and carries the date we checked it. Where we could not verify something, we say so on the page instead of writing around it.

We also name the claims we decided not to make. Several widely repeated statements about competitors turned out to be unsupported when we went looking for the source, and the pages say that explicitly. A comparison that only ever finds fault with the alternative is an advertisement, and we would rather publish something you can check.