Hosted VoIP

Consumers and businesses frequently face a common dilemma when they move locations — determining the most effective way to communicate their new contact information to friends, family, and business associates. Indeed, even moving as little as a mile or two from their current location can result in the inability to retain their existing number(s).

 

What is truly valuable to businesses and residential phone customers is their phone number, not the phone line, as traditional phone companies would like their customers to believe.  Those phone companies try to leverage their control of local phone lines to retain their customers that don’t want to lose their number(s).  RNK, however, is wrestling that advantage away from them by freeing the number from the line.

 

RNK Communications (News - Alert), however, is aiming to resolve that issue but offering a solution that will enable customers to retain their existing phone number, whether they’re moving two miles or 2,000 miles. For a low monthly rate, RNK now enables customers to port their existing number — from any type of telephony provider (i.e., landline, cell, VoIP) to RNK’s new Phone Number Bank (PNB). RNK, a regulated phone company, then delivers all incoming calls to that number to any selection of new landline or mobile numbers.

 

In simplified terms, RNK PNB customers are able to forward calls to any existing phone number to any phone of their choosing — VoIP phone, mobile device, office phone, home landline, etc.  They are able to manage the forwarding numbers through an easy-to-use Web site, including any of the other features available from other providers that offer single number communications.

 

There are, of course, a number of those other companies that offer hosted voice services and enable single-number contact and find me/follow me capabilities, but with a major difference. With those services, subscribers are assigned a new number, which then can deliver calls to any number of other devices, whereas RNK enables them to use their existing landline number for as long as they desire, wherever they are. In fact, as features and functionality are concerned, RNK says it can provide the same services that other providers tout.  

 

“There’s nothing that you can imagine that either we don’t have now or, if you ask us, that we can’t do,” said RNK CEO and president Rich Koch.  “The advantage we have is being a regulated phone entity, which allows us to port numbers and own them.”

 

For instance, with the enhanced coverage and convenience offered by cellular services, many people are considering dropping their landlines altogether. With RNK, they can do that without having to give up their landline number.  Rather than telling everyone to call their mobile numbers, they simply port those landline numbers to RNK, forward those calls to their cell numbers, and contacts continue using the same contact information they already have.

 

Businesses looking to move to new facilities can do the same.  Instead of having to let contacts know they have new numbers, they simply forward their exiting numbers to the new ones. By doing this, they also eliminate the hassle and cost associated with updating business cards, stationery, and marketing material.

 

Or, for the many families with multiple home phone lines to accommodate phone-monopolizing teens, when those children head off to college, they are able to keep the same numbers — which they can then continue to use once they move off campus, graduate, and get married.

 

“This makes your phone number like your social security number — you keep it for life,” explained Koch.  “With PNB, you can move anywhere and it’s still your number.”

 

Koch added that, being a small phone company, RNK would have difficulty competing with larger telcos for phone line business.  Instead, he said, RNK looks for new and creative ways to leverage its status as a phone company leverage today’s technology to solve many of the issues facing businesses and consumers today. Of, course, RNK can provide new phone numbers as well for customers that do not require porting an existing number or who are simply in need of additional numbers.

 

“This solves the problem of 60 million people moving ten times in their lives, and it solves the problem of people having too many phone lines,” concluded Koch.