IT support and business phone systems in Chorley

Distance

About 22 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 30 minutes

Main route

M65 to M61 J8

Postcode areas

PR6, PR7

Dialling code

01257 Ofcom lists this code as Coppull; it covers Chorley

County

Lancashire

A commuter borough with modern commercial stock

Chorley's position - on the West Coast Main Line, at the meeting of the M61 and M6, twenty-five minutes from Preston and forty from Manchester - has made it a commuter town with an unusually mobile workforce. Its commercial development reflects that: Buckshaw Village, built out on the former Royal Ordnance site, mixes housing with business space and has its own railway station; the parks along the M61 corridor carry logistics, distribution and trade counter operations; the town centre and the older estates hold the professional firms, trades and independents.

For our purposes, the important consequence is prosaic: much of that space is new enough that the connectivity story is a good one. Full fibre availability at modern Chorley business addresses is generally better than at the Victorian mill conversions we deal with closer to home, and where it is not, the ducting is usually there to make a leased line install straightforward rather than a civils project.

That does not mean skip the check. It means the check is more likely to come back with good news.

Hybrid working is the defining technical fact here

More than anywhere else on our patch, Chorley businesses have people who are genuinely split between an office, home and a client site. That has three practical consequences.

Your phone system should not be in your building. If half your team is elsewhere on any given day, a system that only works at desks is actively obstructive. A hosted phone system puts the same extension on a desk phone, a laptop and a mobile, with one voicemail and one set of call rules. When the analogue lines go on 31 January 2027, that becomes the default anyway - it is worth choosing it deliberately rather than being migrated into it.

Your security perimeter is not your office either. The traditional model - a firewall at the door and trust everything inside - stopped describing reality some time ago. What matters now is identity: multi-factor authentication everywhere, managed devices, conditional access rules, and the ability to cut off a lost laptop remotely. Our remote working security guide covers the practical list, and it is mostly configuration rather than purchase.

Your office connection may be over-specified while your people's are under-specified. Businesses often keep paying for a connection sized for a full building nobody fills, while the person doing the most bandwidth-intensive work is on a domestic line. That is worth rebalancing.

Keeping the phone system you already bought

A question we get more in Chorley than elsewhere, because a lot of the office stock here was fitted out in the last decade: we bought a decent phone system fairly recently - does it have to go?

Sometimes not. If the system is SIP-capable, it can often be kept and re-fed with SIP trunks instead of the ISDN or analogue lines that are disappearing. Whether that is the right call depends on the age of the hardware, what the maintenance costs, and whether you would actually miss the features a hosted platform adds. We work through that properly in SIP trunking versus hosted VoIP - it is a genuine comparison, not a sales funnel, and for some businesses keeping the box for another few years is the right answer.