When Telstra announced it would offer visual voicemail on iPhones, we ran through an analysis of whether the service was worth paying for. Here's one specific scenario we didn't consider: retrieving voicemail when overseas.

Bad news if you don't fancy paying Telstra $5 a month for its newly-announced iPhone visual voicemail service and don't think Vodafone is up to the task: Optus says it has no plans for adding the option for its iPhone customers.

As we foreshadowed yesterday, Telstra is belatedly adding the visual voicemail feature for iPhone users -- but if you want it, you'll have to pay $5 a month for the privilege. Is that a worthwhile investment? The answer is "maybe", if you get a lot of voicemail from a fairly predictable group of contacts.

Telstra hasn't yet officially confirmed it online, but some Twitter users have reported that visual voicemail is now available as an option for their Telstra iPhone accounts -- for an additional $5 a month.