Kept out of sight: the strange case of Apple's disappearing visual voicemail

Although the name was a little confusing, the functionality it offered looked like a real step forward: instead of the Apple iPhone user receiving a notification and having to dial in to retrieve the message when a voicemail was deposited (as with a conventional phone), Apple’s Visual Voicemail was designed to send the whole message to the handset.

An indicator on the iPhone would show the number of voicemails received and by simply pressing the VV button the user could make a list appear. If the calls were from contacts stored on the handset, their details would appear as well. By selecting the voicemail it would play back immediately and could be played back as many times as required, without having to dial in each time.

For those users who roam regularly, the savings could have been enormous. So maybe that's the factor that accounts for operators' apparent reluctance to support Visual Voicemail in their networks?

After all, the feature sits on every iPhone and operators were offered the network-side technology to take advantage of it. But it turns out that the majority of the reported 16 million iPhones sold are now on GSM mobile networks where the operators have been slow to implement, safe in the knowledge that most iPhone users are not even aware their Visual Voicemail is not functioning.

Certainly the provision of this service requires that mobile operators make some investment in their own messaging infrastructure. Although the full commercial details between Apple and its partners are not public knowledge, it is believed that Apple offered the basic technology but that the operators had to implement it.