Moving Our Business To Spain

Woofbag

Hi there,
I wonder if anyone can help us with this one. We're moving to Spain in October & taking our home based business with us. Our business relies on clients calling us from the UK. We don't want to put clients off by giving them an international number to call (even though there are so many cheap call providers). We detest 0870/0871 numbers, but perhaps this is the only way for us to disguise the fact that we are now operating from abroad? However, the 0870 would mean that we have to pay the international part of the call. Is there any way around this? Would really appreciate it if anyone has any info on this & how we can save ourselves, & our clients, money. Thanks in advance.

budgetflyer

what about 0800 ? Costs your clients nothing

aerostar

If where you are moving to in Spain has broadband and is reliable, you can get yourself a free UK number (not 08xxx, but geographical)from Sipgate, and then either use your computer with voip software or get yourself a software compatible phone.

Once you are connected to broadband and logged on - your customers just dial the uk number you have given them from their normal phone, and regardless of where you are in the world your computer phone would ring.

Normal phone costs to your customer.


This coupled with using say 1899 or 18866 VOIP means that you can call back to the UK for nothing (current pricing but could change).


Have a look around at VOIP Sipgate etc - it could save you a lot of loot.

tonys_3

Have you looked at retaining your present number,connected to an automatic redirect?
Might be a bit expensive if using BT,[I haven't checked lately,but they used to be
exorbitant for overseas calls] but one tel have their own lines,so a talk with them
might help.

Woofbag

Brilliant suggestion Aerostar! Have set an account up & it works a treat! Thanks so much! Do you know if there's anyway we can do a similar thing with an ISDN line as our business requires audio to be sent via ISDN. Thanks again!

aerostar

Sorry not really into ISDN - When you say audio, what exactly do you mean ? what is the audio and how are you sending it now ?

Woofbag

aerostar wrote:

Sorry not really into ISDN - When you say audio, what exactly do you mean ? what is the audio and how are you sending it now ?

Speech - we run a voice over company & we need the ISDN line to send recordings for commercials. We currently use an ISDN line with BT. Telefonica in Spain provide a similar service, but our business involves clients dialling us up to take a feed from us. We don't want to put them off by giving them an international number to call. The alternative is for us to call them, but this will obviously cost us & we're a very small, very new business.

aerostar

If you have the recordings on the computer, why not setup your computer with an ftp server, create an account on it for each of your clients, login and user name, this would be quite secure, put your voice over recording in a wav file or mp3, the customer can then log into your ftp server and download the file - it would be quicker than ISDN. The only drawback is that your ISP in Spain would have to give you a static IP address. - The customer would not necessarily know where you are located unless they did a whois on the ip address, and all that would say is that telefonica is your ISP.

Me thinks we should move this to Private messaging as it is getting a bit technical and probably not now fully in the MSE spirit.

Felix

Is it possible to set up an 0845 number to go to an international number? Someone mentioned 0800 but what is the cost to the business?

BenL

I guess its possible, look at Norwich Union/Sky etc forwarding calls to India.

How do they do it??

Ben

Felix

Thats what I was wondering. Obviously there is a charge. Maybe a call to BT is needed.