VoIP and phone system support

Everything on these pages is free to read and none of it asks for your email first. If your phones are down right now, ring the number at the top of this page rather than working through it.

Two minutes before you ring anyone

Some faults are quicker to check than to describe over the phone. None of this needs a technician and none of it can make things worse.

• Is it one handset or all of them? One points at that phone or its cable. All of them points at the connection or at the system itself
• Has anything changed recently? A new router, a new switch, an internet upgrade or a power cut the night before is worth mentioning when you ring, because it is often relevant
• What is the handset actually showing? A registration error, a blank screen and a screen that looks completely normal are three different problems
• If it is only one phone, restart that handset and give it a few minutes to come back. Do not factory reset it, because that clears settings somebody will have to put back

Two things worth not doing. Restarting the router, the switch or the phone system can take the whole office down, so leave that to whoever looks after it. And do not unplug a handset to test its cable with a laptop, because plenty of business networks only allow a phone on that port and the answer will mislead you.

If none of that moves it, the pages below go deeper by brand, and the guides underneath them cover specific jobs.

If your equipment is not one of the brands below

We work on more than the five with pages here, and some of what we are asked about has no page yet. The fuller list is on brands we support, along with what we can and cannot do with equipment we did not supply.

The badge is rarely the obstacle. What matters more is what the system is, how it was set up, and who still has access to it.

If you are on somebody else’s hosted service

A lot of people find these pages looking for help with a service a carrier or large provider sold them, rather than a system of their own.

Supporting another provider’s platform from the outside is not something we can offer, because we have no access to it. Better said here than discovered on a call.

What we can do is look at the equipment on your desks and tell you what would need checking before a move. Whether the handsets could come with you depends on who owns them, how they were supplied and whether anybody can still get into them, so it is a question to answer rather than assume.

The porting side of that is on our business VoIP systems page.

When the manufacturer is the right call, and when we are

If your equipment is under a manufacturer warranty, or a fault is genuinely a hardware defect, that is usually the route to take, whether you go direct or through whoever supplied it. We have no reason to steer you away from it and we will say so when we think that is where you should be.

Where a fault turns out to be configuration, or nobody can work out which of three suppliers owns it, that is the part we are useful for. If you would rather somebody looked after a system on an ongoing basis than fixed one thing at a time, that is set out on our outsourced VoIP support page.