Editing Call forwarding (section)

==Uses==
Diverting calls can increase one's availability to callers. The main alternative is an answering machine or voicemail, but some callers do not wish to leave a recorded message, but want to have a two-way conversation.

Some businesses have their calls forwarded to a [[call center]], so that the client can reach an operator instead of an answering machine or voice mail. Before the availability of call forwarding, commercial [[answering service]]s needed to physically connect to every line for which they provided after-hours response; this required their offices to be located near the local central exchange and be fed by a huge multi-pair trunk in which a separate pair of wires existed for each client subscriber. With call forwarding, there is no physical connection to the client's main telephone service, which is merely call-forwarded to the answering service (usually on a [[direct inward dial]] number) at the end of the business day.

Often, a suburb of a large city is a toll call from many suburban exchanges on the opposite side of the same city, even though all of these suburbs are a local call to the city centre. A business located in such a suburb may therefore benefit from obtaining a downtown number as an "extender", to be permanently forwarded to their geographic suburban number.

Where unlimited local calls are flat-rated and long-distance incurs high per-minute charges, the downtown number's wider local calling area represents a commercial advantage. [[Markham, Ontario|Markham]] (directly north of [[Toronto]]) is long-distance to [[Mississauga, Ontario|Mississauga]] (directly west of Toronto). A Markham business with a forwarded [[area code 416|416]] number could receive calls from Toronto's entire local calling area without incurring long-distance tolls (as both legs, Mississauga → Toronto and Toronto → Markham, are each a local call).

Some services offer international call forwarding by allocating for the customer a local [[virtual number|virtual phone number]] which is forwarded to any other international destination. The number was permanently forwarded and had no associated telephone line. As a means to obtain an inbound number from another town or region for business use, [[remote call forwarding]] schemes tend to be far less expensive than [[foreign exchange line]]s but more costly than using [[voice over IP]] to obtain a local number in the chosen city.

Call forwarding can also assist travelers who do not have international cell phone plans and who wish to continue to receive their voicemails through [[Voice over IP|VoIP]] easily while abroad.