Need help with office phone setup

[ghost]

Hey guys, I am having a shitload of trouble with my phone setup for my two offices.  I have an office that I am at 2 days per week (North office) and another office that I'm at 2-3 days per week (South office).  The offices are roughly 15 miles apart.  Each office has a separate phone number that rings at the individual office, i.e. North and South are separate lines.  Having an individual staff each office 40 hours per week is simply not possible at this point, and I'm not sure if I ever want to have that sort of staff load if I can help it.  So right now we have been manually forwarding the lines, which has been a huge disaster.  Either the lines don't actually get forwarded or there is some sort of technical glitch that keeps us from being able to reforward which creates some sort of death loop between the phones. 

What I would really like is a solution that would allow me to have a singular phone number (or even two) that would ring in both offices at the same time.  I don't know if there is a VOIP that would allow for this.  I know that my local phone companies do not have this available (ATT and TWC).  Maybe I could set up a line that would forward to two phone numbers and use this single line as my default line.

Halp!      I know almost nothing about telephones. 

[Chimpy]

Some VoIP solutions would indeed allow for this. There was one company I did a little bit of work with troubleshooting a customer issue once that actually had a system that used Cisco VoIP phones but instead of requiring a full Cisco VoIP system which is all effectively LAN based, all it required was the phone and a special routing box and it communicated with their VoIP gateways over the internet. If I remember correctly they were pretty scalable and were designed to be for small businesses wanting the functionality of a VoIP PBX without the hassles of hardware installation, maintenance, and the big headache of getting lines from the phone company. It was something similar to this http://www.megapath.com/offer/free-phone/?gclid=CLvBx4ThxKcCFUS5KgodEBWLEg though I am pretty sure that is a different company, the system would effectively be the same.

Hell, you could in theory set up a Google Voice number which would have 2 forwarding lines (or even more) and just log in and set it to forward to whichever one you wanted at any given time. Also you would get the added benefit of voicemails being in email.

[Samwise]

Hell, you could in theory set up a Google Voice number which would have 2 forwarding lines (or even more) and just log in and set it to forward to whichever one you wanted at any given time. Also you would get the added benefit of voicemails being in email.

This.  You don't even need to switch it based on where you are; just have it ring both phones at once.

[MuffinMan]

 I Google Voice. Being able to mark someone as spam so it doesn't even ring my phone and just tells them my phone number has been disconnected is a godsend. Also, I get a good laugh out of the voicemail "transcriptions."

[Ironwood]

Another service people rave about that's not yet reached the third world that is the UK.

 

[Tmon]

Second Google Voice, it's perfect for what you want to do.  You can even add your cell phone into the mix.

[ghost]

I've checked a few VOIP options, including Google voice.  I decided to go with a company called 8x8 because the guy seemed to know what he was talking about and was pretty helpful.  Also, I would need about 10 phones which were VOIP capable.  So far it has been pretty easy to set up.  Thanks   for all the helpful ideas.  I'll post an update once I get it up and running.  

Edit:  I wasn't sure that Google Voice would allow me to keep my existing numbers, which is super important.