I have been having a problem vith visual voice mail on my iphone since September when IOS 7 first became available. I have spent hours and hours on these forums looking for clues. I have tried everything ... reset my voice mail password, reset my network settings, send myself a voice mail, and nothing worked, until today.
The symptoms boiled down to (a) a caller left a voice mail, (b) the VM badge illuminated on the Phone app, (c) the screen showed a voice mail present, but the "play" arrow and progress bar were greyed out. I could see, therefore, that a voice mail was there, but I couldn't play it.
Today, I called Verizon Wireless Customer Serve telephone number, indicated that I had a problem with voice mail, and asked for Tech Support. I explained the problem to the Tech Rep, and told her that I had learned that the problem seems to correct itself once the account has been "re-provisioned". Can we simply skip to that point?
She asked a few more technical questions, and I gave her some numbers buried in Settings=>About, and then she said, let's re-provision the account. I was asked to power down the phone while this was going on, and she came back on the line in about a minute and said that it had been done. I had to set up the voice mailbox from scratch. and surprisingly, there were old voice mails still i the system. She asked me to delete tham, which I did.
She left me two voice mail messages, and visual voicemail worked. I used my home phone and left a voice mail message, and it worked. I used my neighbor's phone and left mysel a voice mail message, and it worked.
We theorized that the problem is likely one deep within IOS that was made manifest at the introduction of IOS 7. It was a contamination of the voice mail app from original VZW information, and that the best way of dealing with it was to "re-provision" the voice mail account.
By the way, "re-provisioning" merely deletes and re-establishes the account. Nobody has to make a site visit or climb a telephone pole. This entire procvess took 1/2 hour. It's too bad that Apple doesn't acknowledge this as a potential issue and document findings that took me over three months to stumble upon.
I hope this helps.
Willard
Thanks!
