Telstra's iPhone voicemail goes visual, customers viscerally annoyed?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 22 March 2011 12:48

Your IT - Mobility

Nearly half a decade since the first iPhone unleashed visual voicemail unto the world, Telstra has finally launched it in Australia, some time after its competitor Vodafone, but the $5 monthly charge sees some seeing red.

Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company with arguably the world's fastest and best 3.5G mobile network, has finally launched a nearly half-decade old iPhone feature at long last.

The feature is, of course, visual voicemail, where consumers are able to see a list of voicemails they have received, and play them back in any order that takes their fancy.

Despite 'voice-to-text' voicemail transcription systems, either operated by humans, computers, or human-assisted computers, Apple's Visual Voicemail was, like the iPhone itself, a magical and revolutionary new way to listen to messages.

Happily, US iPhone customers on AT&T (which is soon to be AT&T&T-Mobile) got Visual Voicemail as part of their monthly post-paid iPhone package, something that Vodafone customers in Australia have also been able to enjoy, even if Vodafone customers may not have had much else to enjoy recently.

However Telstra did not follow suit, or at least, not until today, with a $5 monthly charge (which naturally equates to $60 per year or just under 17c per day) to take advantage of Apple's now quite old, new feature.

The news has arrived via Telstra's 'Exchange' website, with Telstra naturally billing the advance not only at $5 per month, but is billing it as 'a new and convenient way to manage [your] voicemail.'

It even has a name. No, not Visual Voicemail as you'd expect, but a Telstra name that instantly everyone and no-one will recognise. It's called 'MessageBank Plus' in Telstra speak. I don't know about you, but don't you think 'Visual Voicemail' is far more visceral than MessageBank Plus?

Given the various customer responses to that 'Exchange' story, the commenters in question seem to think it is more like MessageBank Minus because of the additional $5 per month being 'minused' out of their wallets, but in the modern world, despite freeconomics and the like, not everything can always be free.

Continued on page two, please read on!