Verizon iPhone 4s Contact List/International Call Issues

Question

Hi, my wife upgrade her ATT iPhone 3GS to a Verizon 4S. Everything went well except with anumber of issues that all seem to deal with how the phone interprets phone numbers. Here are the symptoms:
– When a phone number is dialed from Contacts, Verizon answer and says you are not able to make international calls
– In the contacts, phone numbers are displayed as 9165554444 in stead of [phone]. Even though on the orignial phone and her laptop they display correctly
– When some calls or texts from a number on the contact list it is not identified even though the number matches those in the contact
– When going to Settings > Phone the phone's own number is diplayed as 9165554444 in stead of [phone].
Some solutions that begin to look promising:
– if you place +1 in front of the existing nmbers they appear in the proper format, [phone], and dial correctly but this would require a retyping of many hundreds of numbers and doesn't totally fix the contact identification issue.
– turning off "International Assist" helps in some of the issues above but not all, and I have always had this on for previous phones, both hers and mine. I have an iPhone 4 with iOS 5 and have the exact settings as she does and have non of the problems.
Anyone have ideas about a solution? I have heard of at least 4 other people having the same problem on different forums.
Richard

Answer 1

Here is something I found in another thread that fixed all the problems ...
Here's another fix that I found in a different thread that worked great for me and is much simpler:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16380402#16380402
The summary:
Here is the summary of the steps I took to correct the issue:
1) Open the Phone and dial *228. This is a Verizon over-the-air programming number.
2) When the system answer press 1 for "Program or activate your phone"
3) Wait for the call to disconnect. You should get a prompt stating something like, "Settings updated."
4) Open the Task Manager and kill the Phone, Message, and Contacts Applications
5) Wait a few minutes (I waited 3 just to be extra safe)
6) Open the Message App to verify the fix.
If you are still broken, kill the Message App again, then reboot your phone.
Good luck!
Ernie
Caller ID not working on iPhone 4S