iPhone 3-Way Calling (Merge Calls)
Have you tried to make a “three-way call” on your iPhone only to have the phone toggle between the two people you have on different lines? We can help.
Apple calls it “merge calls.” This is used when you have a person on the line and you call another person with the hopes of adding them to the call. We bet you can’t do it.
As much as we love our gadgets here at MEDIAdeluge, we don’t usually write gadget how-tos. There are several blogs that do that very well. That said, when we ran into trouble three-way calling on our iPhone and could not find an answer online, we thought we’d post what we learned.
Long story short, we wanted to three-way call on our iPhone and couldn’t. AT&T told us there was nothing they could do with an iPhone. We’d have to schedule an appointment with a genius at an Apple store.
After lots of fiddling, checking reference manuals, changing out the phone, swapping sim cards, the many geniuses who had gravitated to solving the three-way calling problem were stumped. Ultimately they decided it must be an AT&T account provisioning problem.
They were right. AT&T had three-way calling flipped on for our iPhone as part of our plan, but it didn’t work. We tested that feature on the two in-store demo phones. They couldn’t merge calls either. Not until one of the AT&T people flipped on six-way calling did it work.
That’s right, AT&T had to go into it’s “Telligence System” under the “Agreements” tab and turn on six-way calling for our three-way calling to work. It did the trick.
We now have three-way calling and can probably get up to six people on one call.
My guess is most iPhones cannot currently make three-way calls. If you want conference calling functionality, call AT&T, not Apple. They don’t even need you in the store to make the fix.
Many thanks to the AT&T Woodinville store and Apple Bellevue Square for putting up with my pouting and ultimately fixing my phone.
