iPhone Visual Voicemail Problems

If you are having issues with your visual voicemail not working or popping up a message that reads something like the visual voicemail server is unavailable try again later, it may be that you iPhone is set up as a regular phone on AT&T systems. I notice this last night when a friend called and ask me why I haven’t set up my voicemail, I immediately reply to him that it was one of the first things I did when I got my iPhone. When I tried to access my visual voicemail tab on the iPhone a pop up message advised me that the service was unavailable.

First thing I did was to check my account on AT&T web service, and immediately notice that the option for visual voicemail was no longer there. A day before this I went to an AT&T store and added unlimited text messages, my thought is that the person that helped me at AT&T disable the visual voicemail in error. I called AT&T and that was the beginning of a two-hour waste of time for me, if you don’t want to read the story skip to the last paragraph for my recommendation if this problem affects you.

The AT&T CSR was very polite and ignorant to what an iPhone service looks like, she started saying things like “I wonder what this is.” I got so worried, I was thinking that I was going to spend the next couple of days with out internet over GSM, no visual voicemail or what is worst, no service at all. Thankfully, the last thing she said was that it must be a problem with the iPhone and after 40 minutes transfer me to “iPhone tech team.”

iPhone tech team is part of Apple not AT&T, so guess what the tech person at Apple have me resetting my iPhone, twice. She even recommends me to restore the iPhone using the iTunes option, which I did and took about an hour. She finally concluded that the problem was not the iPhone but the service, and transferred me back to AT&T. Two hours into this I lost the little patience I have and rudely hang up, I started looking in the forums for both AT&T and Apple and find out that many people had this issue in the past. The problem is that for some reason the iPhone was set up as a regular phone, the fix is to ask the representative to switch it back to an iPhone line.

I called back to AT&T and went straight to the point, I told the rep that my iPhone was setup as a regular phone and that she needed to fix it for me. She put me on hold for 3 minutes and came back saying that it was fixed and it should take from 24 to 48 hours to be set up as an iPhone again, five minutes later it was working normally, with visual voicemail and everything. There you have it, this is my recommendation if you come across this issue, just ask for your line to be set up as an iPhone line and that will do the trick. If you have had a different experience, share it with the community and save us from future headaches.