Is Telstra's $5 A Month Visual Voicemail Charge Worth It?

As we foreshadowed yesterday, Telstra is belatedly adding the visual voicemail feature for iPhone users — however if you want it, you’ll have to pay $5 a month for the privilege. Is that a worthwhile investment? The answer is “perhaps”, if you get a lot of voicemail from a fairly predictable group of contacts.In the iPhone implementation, Visual Voicemail presents you with a list of all your voicemail messages, letting you select which messages you listen to and even delete messages without hearing them. That’s a more flexible approach than conventional voicemail, which forces you to listen to messages in a given order and often charges you for the privilege.

Even if you’re constantly checking voicemail, whether visual voicemail is useful to you might in some cases depend on how ruthless you are in paring your inbox. If you regularly find yourself deleting messages as shortly as they start, at that time having the option to do that without listening might be useful. It as well depends on functional caller ID: if you regularly get VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls from your mother, they may not show up with an identified caller in your list. All things considered, there’s no absolute answer to whether you should pay for this: it depends on your existing usage patterns, and how much you care about spending $5 a month.

There’s a palpable sense of outrage from some clients that Telstra is charging for this service, nevertheless I think a little pragmatism is in order. No-one seems to have held back on buying an iPhone during waiting for this option, and if you in effect don’t want to pay for visual voicemail, at that time you can always use Vodafone. Given its network woes, Vodafone is in no position to start charging for that option, yet Telstra arguably has the luxury of for the time being trying on that approach. And if you don’t want it, no-one is forcing you to buy it. As one commenter on our before story pointed out, anyway no-one is being made to pay extra for tethering.

Three will automatically send all your voicemails as attachments to your Three email account. So I set up my Three email account up on my iPhone and whenever I get the “new voicemail” notification I can pop into Mail and listen to the message there.

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