IT support and business phones in Skipton

Distance

About 18 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 35 minutes

Main route

A6068 and A56 via Colne

Postcode areas

BD23

Dialling code

01756

County

North Yorkshire

Craven's business mix

Skipton is a market town that does two jobs at once. It is the gateway to the Yorkshire Dales, with the visitor economy that implies - hospitality, retail, outdoor operators, food and drink producers, and a high street that trades well. It is also, less obviously to outsiders, a real professional and financial services centre for its size, anchored by a long-established building society headquartered in the town and the accountancy, legal and advisory firms that cluster around that kind of employer.

Commercially the town spreads out to Snaygill and the industrial areas south towards Keighley, and to the established business park space in the countryside just outside town, where converted estate buildings house a surprising number of professional and technology businesses.

The result is that we get two very different conversations here. Professional firms want reliability, security, sensible remote working and phone systems that can evidence what happened on a call. Visitor businesses want resilience during a busy season and a phone that can be answered when nobody is at the desk. Producers and rural operators want a connection that works at all.

Working with a firm from the other side of the Pennines

We would rather set expectations properly than win work on a vague promise.

What works well at this distance. Remote support is unaffected by geography - a problem is fixed as fast for a Skipton office as for a Burnley one. Phone system deployments, Microsoft 365 work, security configuration, backup and monitoring are all delivered remotely as standard. Planned on-site work - a cabling job, a survey, an installation - is scheduled and we turn up.

What does not. If your business needs someone in the building within the hour on an unplanned basis, we are the wrong choice at thirty-five minutes' drive, and a Skipton or Keighley firm will serve you better. We will say that on the phone rather than after you have signed something.

Our guide to choosing an IT support company sets out the questions worth asking any provider, including us.

Remote and hybrid working is a bigger deal here

A larger-than-average share of Craven's professional workforce works at least partly from home, often in villages some distance from the office. That is a security question as much as a connectivity one, and it is regularly handled badly: company data on personal laptops, no device encryption, no way to revoke access from a machine you cannot physically reach.

The fixes are unglamorous and effective - managed devices, conditional access, multi-factor authentication everywhere, and a clear line between company data and personal kit. Our remote working security guide covers the practical list.

Phones follow the same logic. Once the analogue lines go on 31 January 2027, a hosted system means the office number rings on a laptop in Grassington just as readily as on a desk in Skipton. That is not a compromise; for a distributed professional firm it is a better arrangement than the one it replaces. The cost of hosted telephony is generally lower than the lines and maintenance it displaces.

Buying phone lines and systems as a Yorkshire business

One quirk worth mentioning: because Skipton sits at the edge of several suppliers' regional patches, quotes vary more here than they should. It is worth getting three, and worth comparing them properly rather than on headline monthly price - our guide to what a business phone line actually costs sets out what actually differs between them.

For sites that genuinely need guaranteed bandwidth and a hard SLA - a professional firm running everything in the cloud, say - a leased line can make sense, but get the excess construction charges surveyed first. Rural and semi-rural addresses are exactly where those charges bite.