My ipad 2 is into day 2 of "repair". Face time and imessage

Question

I'm not the only ipad 2 owner with facetime faults and imessage problems. Its just plainly a question of poor build quality. Support sent me to a local third party service centre and they may charge a fee. Its costing me lots of cash and I am not happy to say the least. I'm concidering my options and depending on what the repair centre say, I will then decide what to do.

Answer 1

Facetime requires wifi so its possible you have a firewall issue (or a porting issue if behind a NAT firewall at your router)- the fact that you can call your fiancee straight back seems to indicate you are using a port that is still open - but after it closes you cannot initiate a call yourself.  Routers have many strange behaviours, one of which is to allow bidirectional communication when communication is established in one direction to start with - incoming or outgoing.  Check your router help to see if you had to set up port forwarding to allow traffic in on a specific port - then check you have the same port configured to allow outgoing - sometimes you have to specify both directions so traffic can initiate in both directions.
http://homepage.mac.com/car1son/static_port_fwd_portfwd.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1629
Will help you check/setup having referrred to your routers documentation.
iMessage runs in the default account (normally the Appleid email address you set up your id with)
It may help if you go to
Settings\Mail, Contacts,Calendar  then click on your email address that you use for iMessage - this will be one listed in Settings\Messages - Receive At field.
In the email Accounts section look up the .me.com server for smtp - make a note of the settings
navigate to your own email address you use for messaging and on the email account details page click on SMTP - then add server, and then add the smtp .me.com details.
Whilst in settings\Mail,Contacts,Calendars - under Accounts check Fetch shows Push, click on it and check through all the available options for email are set to Push wherever possible and fetch is set 15 minutes for the fetch cycle.
not all email servers will support push - if you use a server through some emails they will default to using the fetch cycle - I suspect from what you tell me that is what is happening.
The Apple .me.com server supports Push (unless you turn it onto fetch or manual - so associating this smtp server with your ordinary Receive At email address may help to resolve messaging delay issues.
Have a trawl through the info here, let me know how you get on.
Also if you have not already done so, can you add, iMessage and facetime to ON in your notification centre - and set the Alert style to Banner for me.  Turn restrictions off altogether while we test your configuration.  I would also like to know if you can swap your ipad with your fiancee's at some point so that you are using different ipads against your own home netowrks - this may help isolate issues with either home wifi connectivity or idevice.
Regards, Ct