One Company, Many Cities, One Phone System

For four decades the corporate phone system had a physical address. It lived in a wiring cupboard: a PBX unit, punch-down blocks, a technician on a maintenance contract, and a desk phone on every desk it served. That model assumes the desks exist. A team spread across three cities and a dozen home offices has no cupboard for the box and no desk to anchor an extension to.

The business workspace inside MPower Space rebuilds the same call logic in software. The routing that once ran on hardware now runs on our own infrastructure in Germany, and reaches each member through the app they already carry. There is nothing to install, nothing to wire, and nothing to ship to a new hire in another country.

Extensions that follow the person, not the desk

Every member of a company receives an internal extension: a short number colleagues dial to reach them directly. Because the extension is bound to an identity in the app rather than a socket in a wall, it rings the right person whether they are in Dubai, London or São Paulo, with no change to how it is dialled. Your verified phone number remains your identity across the platform; the extension sits alongside it as the internal shortcut.

Calls between members are app-to-app, and therefore free anywhere in the world, as are messaging, files, voice notes, live location and video. A colleague on another continent costs the same to reach as one at the next desk, because in this model there is no next desk.

A conference room on 3990, an attendant on 3900

Dial 3990 and you are in the company conference room. It is a standing bridge, always available, with no meeting to schedule, no dial-in codes to circulate and no per-seat licence to count. Any member joins by dialling the number.

3900 is the automated attendant, the menu an outside caller hears first. You configure it in plain text. You type the greeting and the options, and an AI voice reads them aloud to the caller. There is no need to record audio in a quiet room, and no re-recording when a department is renamed or a person moves on. Edit the text, and the spoken menu changes with it. Each option routes the caller to the extension you assign, so a small team can present the front door of a much larger one.

Forwarding, caller identity, and the honest limits

Call forwarding sends an extension's calls onward: to another extension when someone is away, or to an outside mobile or landline when a call needs to leave the company entirely. It is the piece that lets a distributed team behave like a single switchboard without owning one.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, cost. Reaching other MPower users is free, but dialling ordinary landline and mobile numbers is the paid feature. Those calls are billed per started minute at per-destination rates, drawn from a prepaid balance in US dollars that you top up in the app. Before you dial, the app shows whether a number is free or charged and what your balance is; the actual cost appears afterwards in balance history. On calls to ordinary numbers, your own company number is shown as caller ID once it is verified with the carrier under Settings and Caller ID; until then, a shared MPower number is used.

Second, security. Calls and messages are encrypted in transit, and messages are also encrypted at rest. This is not end-to-end encryption, and we do not describe it as such. A business making decisions about confidential conversations should understand exactly what the protection is and where it stops.

The switchboard was never really about hardware. It was about routing a call to the right person and giving a small operation the composure of a large one. Software now does that work without the cupboard, and it does it for teams that no longer share a building. As work continues to distribute across cities and time zones, the phone system that matters is the one that travels with the people using it, and asks nothing of the walls around them.