Voicemail AND Texting issues

AaronHeth · Jul 1, 2007

After about 24 hours of activation, I got through to someone who said the problem was the 1500 text message plan was holding my account. She took it off and put it back on, and boom, activated

I can make and recieve calls and its been about 13 hours since I've been activated, however my text messaging won't work. Period. If AT&T sends me one, it doesn't come in. If a friend, it doesn't.

When I try to send one it gets about 3/4ths of a progress bar then says "Error Sending Message"

My visual voicemail also does nothing. When I click voicemail the button highlights but the screen doesn't change, it won't even dial a number to my voicemail or prompt me to set up.

When I dock my iPhone, under Summary where it says Phone number it says N/A. I am an existing AT&T customer for just a few days, I just transfered my number, I should have nothing else on my account so I don't understand. I've called AT&T twice and they've tried things to no avail. Apple couldn't help, I even restored the software but nope.

Any ideas?

ChadG · Jul 1, 2007

Same Problem

I got my iPhone at 6:20 PM on Friday and begun activation with a port from Verizon immediately.

It took until 11:30 PM Saturday night and more that 8 hours on the phone with AT&T and/or Apple to get the phone fully working, but each part started working seperately--first the phone got unlocked but had no service; then I called AT&T back and they tried to force the activation...they couldn't...something was wrong with a feature called MMV-1. Then this morning I called Verizon to ensure that they weren't causing a problem with the port. Verizon was awesome and told me that there was nothing wrong with the port and offered to call AT&T's porting hotline to finish it up. Verizon got AT&T on the phone and then within 15 mins, my phone was working and my number was ported.

But...my visual voicemail and my text messaging would not work...

When I clicked on Voicemail, nothing would happen, it would just jump back to the dial pad.

I called AT&T again, and they determined that Voicemail & Texting was not properly configured, so they reconfigured it. As soon as they did that, the texting began to work.

When I pressed the voicemail button on the iPhone, it would dial voicemail as opposed to going into the visual voicemail screen as it was supposed to. When the AT&T voicemail robot answered the phone, it said that I was calling from an invaild number.

AT&T could not figure out the problem and it became apparent that I needed Apple to get involved.

I called Apple and explained to them that iTunes was displaying my number as n/a and that voicemail was not working. They had me restore the iPhone using the restore tool in iTunes. This did not work.

The representative then gave me an escalation number and a case number and put me in an Apple escalation queue. I waited there for about 40 mins.

The person who answered was bascially a receptionist for the engineering department. She asked me questions, had me try the restore again, took detailed notes and told me I would get a return call from an Engineer within 24-48 hours...

That was at 5:50 pm EST.

The wait continues, but at least I can use 90% of my iPhone.

I hate to say it, but this is typical Apple. I will say that as is typical Apple, the iPhone is about 1000% better than my Motorola KRZR, so, if you do the math, the iphone is only 990% better than the KRZR for the time being...

Argelius · Jul 1, 2007

Same problem! No texting or visual voicemail

Redundant, but here's my issues:

It's been a very long weekend, but I'll spare repeating all of the horror stories that have been posed elsewhere ad nauseum.

I finally got activated (can send and receive calls). However, I now find that:

[1] I can seemingly send SMS Text messages (i.e. no error messages are received); however, no one ever receives the messages (this is true for AT&T and non AT&T customers). I also dont receive any messages either (and yes, I have SMS messages in my plan).

I read elsewhere that the mobile phone numbers in your contact list need a "1" before the phone number to send text messages. I tried added a 1 to my "textable" contacts", but that didn't change the above behavior.

[2] When I tap the voicemail icon on the phone screen, the phone starts dialing the number to retrieve voicemails -- there is no visual voicemail or setup screen for it. (I have a friend who also has an iPhone and I can see that his phone has the visual voicemail stuff).

I set up my password (via the regular dial-up voicemail number), then power-cycled my phone. But to no avail...

AaronHeth · Jul 1, 2007

Update:

Some issues I've discovered. As I said, iTunes shows my number as N/a, consequently in my contacts my number does NOT appear at the top of the list like the iPhone User Manual said it should.

I believe ALL of these issues are connected, and even though our phones are activated and can receive calls, it appears our phones themselves do not know they have a number. This sounds like it is a server issue not "telling" the iPhone or relaying the info quite right, while the server can still handle calls for some reason.

I've talked to 4 AT&T reps today and 1 Apple rep. The Apple rep was useless and just walked me through troubleshooting steps. He was putting me through to his product manager but the wait was too long. I hung up and restored my iPhone. When I docked, it asked me to either activate a new phone or restore to a previous docked iPhone, which I did.

Thus I do not believe it is the iPhone software specifically.

The AT&T reps I spoke to said it is not a SIM card error, because if it were, we would not be able to receive calls. At this time I cannot confirm this, but I believe they're probably right--that is to say, I don't think we'll need to get new SIM cards (hopefully).

The LAST rep I talked today was the most helpful. He tried a few things and said he found the problem but could not fix it today. Since it is Sunday AT&T is on after hours and thus do not have access to all of the techs. He said tomorrow to call and he put a note on my account about the problem. His words were along the lines of

"There is a network problem and you'll have to tell them to remove the restriction" He continually talked about a network issue. Now, he said this was dealing with SMS messaging only and did not know about my voicemail issue.

I won't be able to try this until tomorrow so he may not know anything, but I'm hoping and thinking he's right. A "network" issue sounds the most reasonable, and I have a feeling that this one issue is the cause of ALL of these problems: SMS messaging, voicemail logging in, and reading my phone number.

Think about it, if the phone can't tell what number it is, how can it accurately send a text message? What does it tell the voicemail server when it is logging in? Nothing. It doesn't know what it is. This would explain why EDGE would work (it doesn't specifically need the number) but not other data features, I hope.

I'll find out tomorrow morning, but I'm crossing my fingers. Signs look good, we'll see.

If anyone else has any new information please add!

AaronHeth · Jul 2, 2007

Problem Solved

Make sure to call AT&T wireless support, and NOT iPhone Activation Support

Both of my issues were solved today. The text message issue was apparently "simple and overlooked." That's all I know on that.

As for voicemail issues, apparently my phone didn't recognize its own number like I had thought, so they had to push an update to my SIM card, and then deactivate and reactivate voicemail. This worked perfectly. Wish I had more info to help anyone else having problems.

Argelius · Jul 2, 2007

My problem solved as well.

I was also having problems with no text messaging or visual voicemail (previously posted above).

After being (annoyingly) bounced from AT&T rep to AT&T rep they finally determined that there was no data plan associated with my account. Once that was corrected, presto -- my iPhone is now 100% operational!

Love the phone, but must add the obligatory statement about the utter incompetence of AT&T. It took me two days to find a support rep to figure out the problem. Evidently during the activation process, the data plan choice got mangled or something. My account at att.com said I had the data plan, but evidently I really didn't...

grendel3 · Jul 22, 2008

I had a problem with my Voicemail button not working as well. The problem was that even though the store rep told me he was changing my dataplans to the 3g plan - the result on the AT&T system was that my text and data settings were set to 'per use' so I was being charged the maximum rate AND my voicemail was not working.

For anyone else having an issue with their voicemail or texts, I recomend calling and asking them to make sure your account is correctly set to the 3g Data package and whatever text package you selected. They will be also correcting my charges. They were polite and quick. surprise surprise.

Voicemail AND Texting issues

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