0870 numbers are a special category of UK phone number which are called "non geographic". That means these numbers are not associated with a particular location in the country, and hence can be associated with a fixed set of tarrifs (costs to the caller) that are not distance-dependant.

0870 numbers provide your organisations with the ability to have your calls routed more flexibly, for example if you have more than one office in different parts of the country, perhaps on different shifts, we can control which call centre your customer call will go to. Facilities such as "time of day" routing, split distribution (e.g. allocating calls to different places by percentage), "busy link" (distributing calls to a second location if the first location is busy) are all important features that large organisations might need to make use of to improve customer experience.

For many soho's and sme's that may be working from home or from shared office complexes, a non-geographical telehone number is an ideal solution for contact number. When a customer phones your 0870 number they are automatically (and instantly) redirected to whichever phone number you have given us. Apart from being a memorable number, we can also change the 'destination' or target number as often as you want, for free, just let us know. So if you move office, experience phone line downtime and have access to another phone line, or you simply want the calls redirected to another phone for a short period, your 0870 number always stays the same.

When you purchase a 2fourseven 0870 number, there is absolutely no requirement for extra phone lines or any additional equipment. We simply divert the incoming calls to an existing number of your choice - BT, NTL/Virgin, Telewest... it doesn't matter. Your phone will continue to receive calls on its original number as usual as well as the incoming 0870 calls, and can be used to make outgoing calls as normal.

	They are non-geographic - which means they cost the same to call from anywhere. They can make a small local company have the same presence as a big one. They offer resiliency and business continuity - in the event of overload or disaster calls can seamlessly be routed to another location without the caller needing to know. They allow for "load balancing" - i.e. distributing calls across multiple locations, in order to improve answer times to customers.