To your right, you’ll recognize a familiar sight – Visual Voicemail. You will notice that I took the liberty to remove (rather sloppily, I might add) sensitive information to protect the names of the innocent (and even not-so-innocent). This is your best friend when you can’t answer a call, but when traveling abroad can be a pain in the hind end (more specifically your wallet or purse).

With thanks and due credit to Iljitsch van Beijnum’s article at arstechnicha.com (which I recommend you reading), the method of voicemail retrieval is explained. The way voicemail is handled results in excessive international charges.

Essentially, the visual voicemail that ends up on your iPhone makes a criss-cross journey that would make UPS envious. This is how it works:

1. A call placed to you first travels via your country of origin – no matter where a person is in the world when they call you, the call will FIRST go through your home network.
2. The call is then forwarded to the roaming network you are connected to, seeking you out. You now incur international charges ($).
3. If the call is not answered or if you are not available on the network, it will be routed to your voicemail. This is where it gets fun. The call will now RETURN to your home network, incurring more international charges ($$$). Get the idea?

That’s it for this week’s Tip.  Thanks again to Iljitsch van Beijnum of arstechnicha.com for his article. Check it out! If you have a tip of your own that you would like to share with the rest of us, please leave a Comment or you can email me at: brian.hart@tipb.com.

Disclaimer:  Tip o’ the Week makes no guarantee, express or implied, that any tip found herein will be new or particularly useful to the reader (and don’t forget to clear your schedule, take a deep breath, and call AT&T Customer Service AGAIN to reactivate your voicemail when you get back). 

As posted (and updated) earlier, O2 has officially launched the iPhone in Ireland, making it the fifth country (after the US, UK, Germany, and France) to enjoy the revolutionary phone and breakthrough internet device… ish…

Apple Insider reports that Irish iPhone plans, unlike all previous iPhone plans DO NOT come with unlimited data or visual voicemail (a feature often touted by Steve Jobs as being a prime example of carrier cooperation and hence, the benefit of exclusivity).

There seems to be two options here:

1. We’ve heard before that Edge (2.5G data) coverage isn’t strong in Europe (which more quickly embraced the faster 3G data model), so could this be a (potentially temporary) situation that O2 will rectify over time? If so, we could be looking forward to service improvements and price drops like we saw with O2 in the UK.
2. Or is this a sign that Apple is no longer pressuring carriers to offer affordable, unlimited data plans or features like visual voice mail as part of the iPhone package? If so, this could be the beginning of a far more sweeping and important story. It’s long been rumored that extremely high data rates have kept the iPhone out of countries like Canada, so if Apple is bending to carrier demands on these issues, it could allow the iPhone to spread wider, but at the cost of the concessions Apple was previously able to leverage. (And which analysts said could change the wireless industry)

What do you think? Is this just a temporary road bump on the way to Irish iPhone bliss, or a sign of changing times in carrier-land? And if so, would you prefer to see the iPhone in more countries, even if you get less data and fewer features? Or do you want Apple to hold the line on unlimited plans and visual voicemail-style innovations?