Your community. Your phone service.

Start with your community’s branded portal. Your operator supplies the actual phone extension and device settings.

1. Create or connect your account

Open the portal address your operator shared, select Customer login, and sign in with your CEN account. New customers can register there. Verify your email using the link in your inbox. If you already have a CEN account, use it rather than creating another account.

2. Request access

On the portal’s Overview page, select Request access. New registrations on a portal also create a pending membership. Your operator reviews the request and may assign a seven-digit Local Number. The portal shows whether access is pending, active or suspended.

Account approval does not automatically create a PBX extension. Ask the operator for your server, extension, password, supported phone/softphone and any special dial prefix. Never put a PBX password into a support ticket.

3. Understand your number

A CEN number combines your community’s three-digit area code and your seven-digit Local Number: AAA-XXX-YYYY. Keep leading zeroes. Your operator may use access prefix 88 when dialing another CEN number, so a call to 214-315-1234 becomes 88 214 315 1234. Check your community’s dialing instructions before using it.

Your local extensions and external telephone calls remain under your community’s PBX rules. CEN is a community interconnection service and is not a replacement for emergency telephone service.

4. Get help in your portal

Open Support tickets to send your community operator a request and read replies. Include the time and timezone, destination number, what happened and any CEN announcement code. Replies also arrive by email; replying in the same email thread adds to the conversation. Use the same email address as your account.

For CEN account or platform issues, open a CEN support ticket or email [email protected]. Emailing CEN support opens a platform ticket, not an automatic private ticket with your community. Attachments are not imported; paste redacted text instead. Hear and understand call announcements.

5. Connecting your own application

A customer login grants portal access, not network routing API access. CEN does not currently expose a customer API for extension provisioning, ticket automation, billing or call history. Do not reuse a portal password as an API key or ask an operator to share their network key with browser code.

If you run your own PBX or application, ask your community operator whether they offer a customer integration endpoint or a managed branch. The operator can authorize an appropriate server-side integration using the community API guide. Calls still require configured IAX peers, destination rules and credentials on the PBXs.

Account and privacy

Your CEN identity is shared across CEN subdomains. Memberships, numbers and support tickets are scoped to each community. The community operator and CEN administrators can read that community’s support tickets; other customers cannot. Your operator manages service and activation. For account recovery use Reset password. Read the privacy policy for how account and support information is handled.