I've got AT&T, who preloaded visual voicemail. I just got my wife a Virgin Mobile phone. It didn't occur to me that the VVM was dependent on the network. Guess I thought it was just a UI on the device with a way ... Yeah, I suppose it would need to communicate with the network differently.

So the question is, is there a way to do this on Virgin without paying for a third-party service?

iPhone has an app, all the android apps I see require a third-party service/account.