Oh Telus customers, you will not like this.
If you picked up the iPhone on Telus and purchased Visual Voicemail as part of your Telus iPhone plan, you have probably already realized that you do not have true Apple Visual Voicemail. If you have not realized this, try accessing your Voicemail service from your iPhone. Tada!…FAIL!
Telus + iPhone + Visual Voicemail = FAIL!
While Telus is offering “Visual Voicemail” for $7.50/month, the service is not the true Visual Voicemail as per Apple’s description or as one would see on Rogers or Fido. Instead, the Telus Visual Voicemail is a voicemail-to-text service. In other words, Telus has deceived us all.
As anyone who has used voicemail-to-text based voicemail services knows, the service is rarely accurate. But that is beside the point. What we have here is Telus advertising “Visual Voicemail” for $7.50/month and not offering the real Apple Visual Voicemail service.
You could argue that technically the voicemail is visual because it is text based but that is false. Apple has a specific definition for Visual Voicemail and what Telus labels as “Visual Voicemail” could not be further from the truth. For comparison, Rogers labels their voicemail-to-text service as “Voicemail to Text” and not as Visual Voicemail. Very clear. Very honest.
But there is some good news.
Telus has said that the real Visual Voicemail service as per Apple standards will be available in early 2010, but that sounds more like an excuse than a resolution.
Considering you just signed a 3-year Telus contract with no maximum cancellation fee and are not getting the service you should be getting, I’d like to hear what our Telus iPhone customers have to say about this.
Here’s a video of what REAL Visual Voicemail is supposed be (this is how it looks on Rogers/Fido):
