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Hello all. I was just wondering if it was worth investigating the University of Manchester's halls of residence phone system. I am in the Richmond Park hall, where all of the numbers are of the format 0870 8399 XXXX . The service is run by Kingston Communications, so I don't know if this means they use VoIP or whatever. I could give you more details, but to be honest everything I know seems to be on http://www.accommodation.man.ac.uk/fallowfield/student/richmond.html .

Any help would be great, but I am not going to make a mission out of this (i.e. phoning up thousands of numbers) if there aren't enough clues available.

JC

Thanks very much for your reply. I didn't know about the Kingston /  Do you suggest that I try the numbers with the same XXXX bit as the 0870 format? E.g.:
0161 615 3560
0161 636 3560

etc.?

I will give them a try at a nice sociable hour .

Thanks again,
JC

Hello

Does anyone happen to know the geographical numbers for the halls of residence of Manchester Uni/UMIST?

They are operated by Kingston Communications and have the format 0870 832 ****.

Any help appreciated  8)

When I was a student there, all UMIST extensions (including payphones in student accommodation) were 0161 200 xxxx. They have built many new halls since I left, but these applied to Wright Robinson, Chandos, Grosvenor, Bowden and Ronson in the immediate area of the UMIST campus, plus a few others further out from the centre.

Even if all student rooms have their own phone nowadays, I can't see that they would have used all 9999 possible numbers yet, so there would be no pressing need to change (apart from the offer of some fancy bit of supposedly free kit from a supplier of 0870 numbers!)

Manchester University was less uniform, but many of its central functions and some student halls were 0161 275 xxxx. Many of the Fallowfield halls and sports facilities were 0161 224 xxxx

Unfortunately I don't know whether their phone systems have changed since I last spoke to anyone there (2002), but these may be worth a try. I have obtained answerphones this evening on some UMIST 0161 200 xxxx numbers which I still possess.

Graham