Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Assuming mBox is also emailing you your voicemail messages, the easiest
work-around is to get your email system to send a message to your
iPhone when it receives an mBox message.
I use Fastmail as my email provider, which offers
a lot of flexibility when it comes to server-side rules and
notifications. I've got the option to forward or redirect emails to
another account, or just notifications that an email has arrived. I can
forward messages by SMS, or just send an SMS notification. SMS to
Telstra, Optus and 3 phones cost 9.6 cents, 12 cents to Vodafone and 18
cents to Virgin.
While SMS would be a great solution, it would drive up my incoming call
costs even further. Instead I decided to forward a notification to my
MobileMe account, using the push email settings to send it straight to
my phone. I ran a few tests and it took about 25 seconds for the
notifications to reach my phone.
Of course MobileMe isn't cheap either, it's $129 per year - although if
Apple keeps handing out extensions to apologise for the terrible
service that $129 could stretch a long way (I haven't had any problems with it). I've been using MobileMe
for wireless calendar and contacts sync, so it's money I was already
going to spend. If you've got an Exchange account you could use that to
push mail to your iPhone.
I could just forward my voicemail messages straight to my MobileMe
account, but then the WAV attachments would be automatically pushed to
my phone - most likely over the mobile broadband network. This way I
can get a notification over the mobile broadband network and then have
the choice of waiting until I've got wifi access before listening to
the message - or calling into the mBox voicemail system. Also, listening to the messages in the Mail app wouldn't
offer the nice big Call Back button.
It's always frustrated me that the big telcos don't offer voicemail to
email. I'd happily pay a few dollars per month for Telstra to forward
my mobile voicemail as an email attachment. I wouldn't mind the same on
my home phone.
I've just switched to Internode as my ISP and I'm trialling its
NodePhone VoIP service. Internode will email my voicemail to me and I was
contemplating ditching mBox until I discovered the iPhone app. It's a
classic example of how innovation by small players can help them retain
business. Sticking with mBox also means I've got fax to email in an
emergency. Internode intends to offer PSTN services later this year, so
I'm waiting to see if it will offer advanced mBox-like services.
Meanwhile, mBox and Fastmail have put visual voicemail on my iPhone.
David Bass
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