iPhone - no Edge = no Voicemail

[freeflydrew]

If the Edge network is down or unavailable, your iPhone will not receive voicemail.

I consider this a major flaw in the tech design of the voicemail system!

 

[r6girl]

If the Edge network is down or unavailable, your iPhone will not receive voicemail.

I consider this a major flaw in the tech design of the voicemail system!

without edge, you won't be able to use the *visual* voicemail aspect. but when i've been off the edge network, i'm offered an option to *dial* into my voicemail, so i'm still able to retrieve it in some way. i think this is a reasonable workaround.

 

[Roy Hobbs]

If the Edge network is down or unavailable, your iPhone will not receive voicemail.

I consider this a major flaw in the tech design of the voicemail system!

you can always fall back on the "old" way of accessing your Voice Mail

 

[bbplayer5]

Ya but how do you know if you have voicemail if it doesnt show up?

 

[Avatar74]

Ya but how do you know if you have voicemail if it doesnt show up?

You call in. A data transmission is always used for voicemail notifications on digital carrier systems (how else do you think you get voicemail notifications on a cell phone?)... If say GPRS goes down (Backup network? Yeah, right...), no matter what GSM phone you might have, you're not going to get a voicemail notification until GPRS is back up.

Also, digital carrier networks prioritize voice over data, meaning that SMS messages and cellphone paging can be delayed by several minutes to several hours... This is why in my old job, they would not use a cellphone as a pager and instead issued us Skytel pagers because their numerical and text pages are almost instant.

My iPhone is private and not business critical so the chance of visual voicemail going down doesn't bother me, but if it were a corporate phone I'd just make it a practice to call into voice mail several times a day anyway.

 

[boeingair]

You call in. A data transmission is always used for voicemail notifications on digital carrier systems (how else do you think you get voicemail notifications on a cell phone?)... If say GPRS goes down (Backup network? Yeah, right...), no matter what GSM phone you might have, you're not going to get a voicemail notification until GPRS is back up.

No. On GSM phones, the Voicemail Waiting indicator is set on or off via the SMS service (though the message is not displayed in your inbox--rather as a voicemail waiting indicator), which is independent of the GPRS/EDGE side.

 

[Avatar74]

No. On GSM phones, the Voicemail Waiting indicator is set on or off via the SMS service (though the message is not displayed in your inbox--rather as a voicemail waiting indicator), which is independent of the GPRS/EDGE side.

My bad... SMS in that case. But my point is this... if SMS were down, you wouldnt get the voicemail notification in that case. I had a GSM phone that had both a message waiting indicator AND a popup notification message (not just the icon, and not in the SMS inbox) that would tell you how many new voicemails you had waiting... but now come to think of it it may not have been GPRS notification. That being said, if you went roaming in an area where it flipped over to analog (it was a tri-band GSM/TDMA/Analog phone) you wouldn't get voicemail notifications.

One way or the other it's a digital data transmission system that's notifying you... not an analog RF transmission, not carrier pigeon... If that particular digital system is down, no voicemail notification.

If an SMS system goes down, voicemail notification isn't going to be rerouted via GPRS... and even then, when it is working, SMS is prioritized behind voice calls so you won't always get "instant" notifications of voicemails on those phones either.

I'm just telling the OP that every such system has its quirks AND workarounds.

 

[DiamondMac]

I didnt know this.

I have had some problems receiving voice mails on time.

I got 3 voice mails 2 days later the other night.

But usually the voice mails are on time.