Voicemail on VOIP fibre landline

[ChrisNTyne29]

I have just had my Vodafone service connected today and was surprised to find out that Vodafone does not have a voicemail service for VOIP lines. Given that eventually nearly all landlines will be moved to VOIP I'm wondering if Vodafone has any plans to introduce voicemail for VOIP lines. Given that there is no technical reason why this can't be done, as other providers do it.

[CJT80]

@ChrisNTyne29 I have just joined the Vodafone forum for this exact reason.  I had (when signing my Mum up) forgot that Vodafone do NOT provide any form of voicemail service, which (sadly) is confirmed here on their Digital Voice page.  Now annoyingly for my Mum (and myself) she wants to have voicemail, so I now need to see what options are available, but I am fairly certain Vodafone wont offer it. 

[ChrisNTyne29]

OK thanks. The reason I posted the question is that when I didn't know there was no voicemail, I phoned Vodafone to ask to have it set up and the person I spoke to said something along the lines that they were waiting to hear from Openreach about offering this service although no timescale could be given. So I thought I'd ask if anyone knew. Providers such as BT do offer voicemail on digital voice lines, so it's clearly possible. In the short term I'm going to have to go into the loft and dig out our old answering machine.

[CJT80]

Oh, interesting.  I was never given the impression it was ever going to be offered. I wonder if the person you spoke to had new info, or that was the standard response.

[WelshPaul]

The lack of Voicemail is nothing to do with Openreach. In fact, Vodafone's VoIP service has nothing to do with Openreach!

[ChrisNTyne29]

Interesting. So the response I got seems to be mainly waffle. I don't know Vodafone's network architecture but would have thought that somewhere they would have switching centres for the voice traffic where voicemail could be provided. Maybe these are co-located on Openreach premises? I don't know. I worked with a campus VOIP service once but I don't know how it works with a national provider.  

[CJT80]

Thanks @WelshPaul, out of curiosity did you once run a forum about VoIP? 

[ChrisNTyne29]

Maybe a head of steam will build up and force them to address the issue as it is pretty poor. Here's what I read that someone else posted (who'd been 'upgraded'):

So tonight i've sent 2 hour 30 mins on the phone between technical support, cancelations and the return departments asking them to put me on my previous plan, here's what they said.

• We are working on call forwarding and voicemail, sometime before 2025.
• We can't put you back on your old plan as the copper wire's don't work anymore (they do as i am on FTTC)
• If we cancel the upgrade it won't put you back on your old plan it will just cancel this number. 

Please see posting link:

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Landline/Upgraded-to-VoIP-with-FTTC-connection-No-voicemail-or-Call/...

Lack of voicemail is not a huge issue for me personally but I can see why someone who relied on it and was then forced to lose it would be somewhat disgruntled with Vodafone.