IT support and business phone systems in Accrington

Distance

About 9 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 15 minutes

Main route

M65 J7

Postcode areas

BB5

Dialling code

01254 Shared with Blackburn and Darwen

County

Lancashire

Hyndburn's business base

Accrington's industrial history is stamped into the buildings - NORI brick, textile machinery, engineering - and the modern economy has kept a good deal of that character. Hyndburn retains a notably high manufacturing share, alongside distribution and logistics that make full use of the M65 running through the borough.

The main employment sites tell the story: Altham Business Park and the industrial areas around Altham and Huncoat to the east, the Whitebirk corridor on the Blackburn side, and a scatter of smaller estates and converted mills through the town. The Globe Centre provides managed office space for smaller and start-up businesses near the town centre.

Three things follow from that mix.

Upload matters more than people are told. A warehouse pushing stock data, photographs, proof-of-delivery scans and CCTV to the cloud is constrained by upload, not download. A consumer-style broadband package advertised on its download speed is frequently the wrong shape - see symmetric versus asymmetric bandwidth for why that catches people out.

Coverage inside a metal building is its own problem. Steel-clad units eat mobile signal. If your staff rely on handhelds or phones inside the shed, that needs designing - Wi-Fi calling, a properly surveyed wireless network, or in some cases a different network entirely.

Downtime has a number attached. Distribution businesses can usually tell you what an hour of stopped picking costs. Once you have that number, decisions about failover, support cover and leased lines stop being abstract.

Replacing an ageing phone system

A lot of Accrington businesses are running an on-site PBX that was a sensible purchase a decade ago and is now the single least flexible thing they own. The switch-off forces the issue: if it is fed by ISDN or analogue lines, it stops on 31 January 2027.

The honest comparison is not "old system versus new system" - it is total cost over the next five years including maintenance contracts, engineer visits for moves and changes, and the lines underneath. Our hosted versus on-premise PBX guide sets out that arithmetic. For most businesses under about a hundred users the hosted answer wins comfortably, and it wins on capability as well as cost: call recording, queue reporting, working from anywhere, and a change taking two minutes in a browser rather than a callout.

Your numbers move with you. An 01254 number is yours, not the provider's, and porting it is a regulated process - covered in keeping your business landline number.

Choosing a support provider when everyone sounds the same

Accrington businesses have plenty of IT companies to choose from, us included, and every one of them will tell you they are proactive, responsive and local. That is not useful information. The questions that actually separate them are duller and better:

• Who answers the phone at 8:30am on a Monday, and where are they?
• What is included and what is billed? "Unlimited support" that excludes projects, hardware, moves and anything on site is not unlimited.
• What happens at the end of the contract? Can you leave with your documentation, your licences and your admin passwords, or is there a hostage situation?
• Can they show you what they would fix first? A provider who has looked at your estate and can name three things wrong with it is more use than one with a nicer brochure.

Our guide to choosing an IT support company expands on this, including the questions we would rather you asked us.