Why do I have to turn my iphone 6 OFF and ON inorder to access my voicemail messages?

To maybe isolate this further have you done some of the basics?

1 Backup your phone -How to back up your devices using iCloud or iTunes - Apple Support

2 Update and restore through iTunes [as new] - Use iTunes on your Mac or PC to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support

3 Test to see if issues persists - If it does, you have ruled out your data stored on your phone and the OS so you can restore your backup now. If it is resolved, then don't restore the backup.

(If it does persist)

1 Attempt a new SIM from your carrier

2 Have your carrier make a little more effort in verifying that there is no issue on their end, as voicemail is specifically maintained and managed by your carrier solely. Insist that they issue a ticket if it does persist. They will fight you on this, but better to do it than skip it, and find out later that it could have resolved it all along.

3 Contact Apple and ask for a Senior Advisor. They can gather some logs and submit them to Apple's Engineers for review and pursuit of permanent resolution.

If others are not experiencing your same issues while running your same OS on your same carrier, then there is a way.

Best of luck

I am not sure this is worth it. Read your post, I quoted you accurately.

The microcell does NOT route the outgoing call through my WiFi connection. The microcell communicates with the cell phone

over the cellular frequencies, and then ships that out the ethernet connection. That of course has to connect to the internet.

No WiFi is involved in the microcell here.

If we can't keep this technically accurate, we can't hope to even talk about the same things. That's why I try

to keep it technically accurate.

Thanks again.

Never forget, one man's hack is another man's feature.

dr_grid wrote:

Lawrence,

Thank you and I do appreciate your efforts here. Yes, I have cellular data always enabled. I have data roaming enabled,

and this phone is enabled for LTE where that is available.

Here is the set up. At home, my AT&T signal is no good. I installed an AT&T microcell

here 3 years ago so that I can have a working cell phone at home. When WiFi is NOT

enabled, AT&T Microcell 4G is reported. The "4G" is replaced with the WiFi icon when WiFi is on.

I keep WiFi enabled, and when I am at home it will automatically connect to my WiFi network. I need

WiFi to access other devices on my LAN. My understanding is that an iPhone with cellular data enabled

and WiFi enabled will generally used the WiFi connection for data so as not to burden the cellular network.

Is my understanding correct here?

I doubt it makes a difference, the the microcell is the one thing that is not common in the setup here.

However, I did not have this problem with voicemail up until recently -- three or four months ago.

The phone will use WiFi when it is not asleep. When it is asleep, unless it is connect to power, it will turn off WiFi and use cellular data to preserve the battery. There are also a few functions for which it will always use cellular data: MMS messaging, Notifications and Visual Voicemail. And probably a couple of others. But nothing that uses large amounts of data.

I suspect the microcell may be what is responsible for the issue. I don't know the mechanism, but it is the one thing that is different in your setup from the rest of us. Have you tried rebooting the microcell? It may be something that simple.

Another possibility is Notifications. Go to Notifications in Settings and make sure they are enabled for the Phone app.

I know why the problem occurs. When a voicemail is received by the carrier it is saved in the carrier's database, then a notification is sent to the phone "announcing" that it exists. The phone then retrieves it from the carrier voicemail system. If that notification is lost the messages are not retrieved. If you power cycle or reboot the phone it will check with the carrier's voicemail server to find out if it missed any messages while it was off. That's why messages come in after you reboot or power cycle. I don't think turning WiFi on or off will change that behavior. So it is likely that the phone just isn't receiving notifications.

Lawrence,

Thank you for the high "signal to noise" ratio posting. You provide good information and I do

appreciate it. It is more helpful than the boilerplate approach to troubleshooting.

Your understanding about the use of wifi vs the cellular for data matches my understanding.

Ditto for notifications. I think your understanding of the problem is correct with respect to

notifications, and how the phone behaves.

Indeed, the big variable here is the microcell.

Tomorrow I will go to the local AT&T store, and try to reproduce the problem there independent

of my microcell. With luck, they have a working microcell there which could allow for adding

that to the test. But doing this away from my microcell will perhaps give us all a good clue.

But for sure, my observation is that enabling WiFi will break thins for me in this setup. I would

not seem to matter, but as we both know, these are not simple systems.

Thanks again!