Here is a problem that seems to affect phones using Verizon’s network. Although it may affect other carriers. I recently switched from AT&T to Visible Wireless — which is a Verizon subsidiary — and I started to have trouble with visual voicemail on my phone. Numerous chats to Visible’s support people didn’t help. I finally figured out it was my VPN causing the problem.

I use Blokada on my phone to stop Google’s tracking. I rather deal with Google’s tracking than Apple’s unforgivable anti-consumer nonsense. On my old AT&T phone, visual voicemail worked just fine with Blokada version 4 and 5. Not so when I switched to Visible. Blokada works by using the phone’s VPN feature to block trackers. I eventually remembered that to activate my old AT&T hotspot, I always had to turn off Blokada. Once I remembered this, I decided to temporarily disable Blokada to see if visual voicemail started to work. It did.

So, if your visual voicemail doesn’t work on your phone, turn off your VPN and try again. However, you might can still use your VPN. If your VPN app has split tunneling, you will need to use that. Blokada version 5 has this; Blokada version 4 does not. Set the visual voicemail to bypass or to use split tunneling. You may have to have other system apps related to the call do this as well. Starting bypassing system apps related to calling from the VPN one at a time until it works again.

Now if I can only get the people at Visible to understand how much I hate call waiting …

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