IT support and business phones in Todmorden

Distance

About 11 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 25 minutes

Main route

A646 via Cornholme

Postcode areas

OL14

Dialling code

01706 A Lancashire code in a West Yorkshire town

County

West Yorkshire

A town that sits between two counties

Todmorden's oddities are not trivia; they cause real administrative friction. The town is in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, so its council, business rates and local support come from that side. Its phone numbers are 01706 - a code shared with Rochdale and Rossendale, over in Lancashire. Its postcode is OL14, an Oldham-prefixed area. Its rail line runs both ways, to Manchester Victoria and to Leeds.

Practically, this means suppliers regularly get you wrong. Coverage checkers ask for a town and offer you the wrong exchange. National providers assign you to the wrong regional team. Anything that is priced or provisioned by region needs checking rather than assuming, and it is one of the reasons a supplier who has actually driven the A646 is worth something here.

Small, independent and often working from unusual buildings

Todmorden's economy is built on small businesses: independent retail and food, makers and studios in converted mill space, outdoor and tourism operators, trades, and a growing number of people running professional or creative businesses from home or from a shared workspace. The town has a strong self-organising streak - the community food-growing movement that started here is known internationally - and that shows up commercially in a lot of very small, very determined enterprises.

The technology implications are consistent:

• The premises were not built for this. Stone walls, split levels and mill floors are hostile to Wi-Fi. A single router in the corner does not cover a converted weaving shed, and the answer is proper access-point placement rather than a more expensive router.
• There is rarely an IT person. So whatever we set up has to be understandable by the person who runs the business, and documented for whoever comes next.
• Cash flow is real. Recommending a five-figure solution to a business with four staff is not advice, it is a sales pitch. Most of what genuinely helps here costs tens of pounds a month.

Flooding changes the resilience answer

The Calder Valley has flooded badly within recent memory - Todmorden was hit hard in the Boxing Day floods at the end of 2015, and again in early 2020. Defences and warning systems have improved considerably since. We are not raising it to alarm anyone; we are raising it because it changes two specific pieces of technical advice from "nice to have" to "do this".

Do not keep the only copy of your business on the ground floor. If your accounts, your customer records and your photographs live on one machine under a desk, a flood is an extinction event rather than a bad week. Cloud-hosted systems plus a genuine off-site backup remove that risk almost entirely - see our business continuity and disaster recovery guide for how to think about it, and the 3-2-1 backup rule for the mechanics.

Make sure your phones can be answered from somewhere else. With a traditional analogue line, if the building is inaccessible the phone rings in an empty room. With a hosted system, an unreachable site means calls automatically go to mobiles - and customers never know. That is worth having in a valley where the road can close.

The same logic applies to a power cut, which is worth planning for whether or not there is water involved: battery backup on the router and network kit, and an automatic diversion rule. Our guide to landline resilience and failover covers both.

The 2027 deadline in a town of very small businesses

The PSTN switch-off on 31 January 2027 lands hardest on businesses without anyone whose job is to notice it. In Todmorden that is most of them.

If you have a phone line at your premises, the short version is:

1. Find out what is on it. Phones, obviously - but also the card terminal, the alarm, the intercom, the lift if you are in a mill conversion.
2. Decide what replaces each one. For the phone itself, that is usually a hosted service keeping your existing number.
3. Do it in 2026. Not because of a hard-sell deadline, but because everyone who can do the specialist bits - alarm engineers especially - gets busier every month from here.