The provision of phone lines falls into three main categories – analogue, ISDN2 and ISDN30. For SIP trunks please see our separate section on IP SIP . When it comes to the provision of phone lines, there are many different suppliers out there and it’s sometime hard to make decisions between them, when on the face of it they all seem very similar. But of course, that’s not always the case!

In simple terms there are two main types of Communication Providers (CP) - those who have direct access to the BT network or those who buy through an intermediary, and we fall into the first of these categories.

Why are we different?
We have what is known as ‘WLR3 access’. This means that we get our line provisioning and rental from Openreach (which owns and runs the BT network) in exactly the same way that BT Wholesale and BT Retail do.

In effect, this puts us on a level playing field with those organisations in terms of the service we are able to provide - giving us the ability to support you more effectively than a supplier who does not have WLR3 access. This direct access to the BT network also gives us a number of advantages, including the ability to:

• Place orders
• Book installations
• Check engineer schedules
• Analyse and log faults
• Investigate number availability

From our customer’s point of view, it’s everything that they would get directly from BT, but with our service and support overlaid onto it. One call to Clearlink is all they have to make, and we do the rest.