Mobal & Blackberry
 

Hi folks

I have a Mobal SIM and am traveling to Europe in a few weeks.

A workmate has offered to loan me their Blackberry for my trip, so I can keep on top of emails without needing to take a laptop.

Has anyone used a Mobal SIM with a Blackberry before?

I think the blackberry is on AT&T by the way.

Chuck

Any sim will work in any unlocked phone. Now, I am not aware that the mobal sims are data capable. And, even if they are, using it with a blackberry will be another story.

They are data capable but I don't think they offer any bb plan for push e-mail... maybe you can manually check your mail, but it will cost you A LOT...

If the BB is on T-Mobile (U.S.), you can get intl. BB service added on for about 70 cents/day for the time you need it. (Includes email but not data.) ATT intl. BB requires a term commitment (one year?) and is $30/mo extra as a recall.
BB is just now becoming available on a prepaid basis. (I think the first country is UK.) Mobal would not have it - yet.

...mike

just a question for interest: why do you need a special plan for blackberries? Cant they just connect to the blackbarry server over whatever internet connection the mobile operator offers? Or do they wanna earn $$$ from each mobile operator for a license?

Chris

Blackberry connections require access to two APNs, blackberry and blackberry2. All carriers I know of don't allow access to them without a separate subscription.

Ah, they do it on APN level. Thats a smart model to make loads of cash :)
thanks for the info

It would be interesting to test with a o2 SIM in germany. o2 does not differ between APN names, you can just set your phone to the APN "billgatesloveswindows" and will still get internet access with it...

also in Italy you can have BB on prepaid, with a monthly fee of course.
I really don't get much the sense of BB, I even don't like them as interface, I'm totally happy with my Nokia E71! :)

Blackberry prepaid service is available on Digicel (they are now offering 1,2,4 week packages in Bermuda and also in Caribbean countries that have Digicel networks) Digicel Prepaid Blackberry service This would be a good solution for Caribbean blackberry coverage without the committment since Digicel allows some Digicel network prepaid roaming at reasonable rates, but wouldn't help much on other networks in North America or Europe where the rates would be much higher.
Blackberries can be tricked in some instances to access the web and standard email services, I've seen this done with Nextel-Iden blackberries ("Boost Berries)and Verizon CDMA blackberries (PagePlus Blackberries) in the US. Probably a similar procedure with a GSM blackberry, but you would still need some sort of data access and a good question is whether it would be worth the price. Might be worth contacting Mobal to ask if they can officially arrange Blackberry service for your device rather than the clandestine route.

Effendi -
As you probably know, BB use in many places has become an addiction. President Obama, for one. I think I'm about to get one and give up my 6 year old SE, even though it still works fine.
How much is charged for BB in Italy?

...mike

yeah this is a very cursing addiction. Lately we forbid BB in our meetings at the company because customers tend to thumb under the table all the time instead of listening. Which leads to tons of unneccessary calls afterwards.

Chris

It is possible to fool some Blackberries to use an alternative APN but its important to note the costs associated with doing so. Yes Blackberry by standard uses its own APN connection to each MNO having exclusive deals with certain ones in particular regions. Using this particular APN means that the network operator can tariff it differently and have access to the Blackberry APN at a set monthly fee no matter what the usage is and all other mobile data is charged per packet. This means for example using Blackberry over the UM data product could end up being far more expensive than using a standard Blackberry tariff.

As you know I work for Cloud9 but I am based in the UK and therefore have an O2 Blackberry as I get unlimited international Blackberry service for only £13 extra per month. It is just not possible for the current global roaming products to offer this packaged deal for the reason above, you pay per packet you have no idea how much data you will transmit.

That being said, Blackberry service is next on the Cloud9 roadmap to be offered to our resellers to sell to the end users!

PS. Before working at C9 I spend 10 years working in mobile data and met RIM at a conference in Germany in 2000 or sometime close to that, ages ago anyway, when I was selling circuit switched/gprs data mobility and made the mistake thinking the fact it was so insecure would mean it would be dead in the water... how wrong was i on that!! Sometimes it may not please the IT team that anyone can pick it up and read your emails, but people do love Blackberry even if it is the most intrusive gadget in the entire history of mankind.

So to sum up, I would actually recommend checking the rates for adding international blackberry service with the current owners provider it will most likely be cheaper than using a global roaming data service and will work with full support. Use your global roaming for calls obviously!

Hope this helps

Cheers

David

I know about this addiction, but I really don't like them as phones so I just got a new Nokia with qwerty keyboard and I'm totally satisfied with it. And imap with Gmail works well. ;)

BB in Italy on prepaid costs 12€/month with Wind, with unlimited e-mail and surfing. With TIM it's 15€/month including 400MB of e-mails and unlimited surfing. With Vodafone it's 3€/week, including 500MB.

The Nokia etc are agreed better phones, but you just cant get the same rate for international roaming data as with international Blackberry services as they are a standard fee on top of your normal BB subscription rather than pay per use as all other data services are with other handsets when used while roaming.

Does anyone know if what T-Mobile USA is offering will indeed include data and not just e-mail when abroad, as they seem to have an option that costs 20 USD extra that claims to offer just international e-mail & not other data. AT&T's equivalent offer costs more but includes everything. If T-Mobile USA's offer actually does include e-mail or even all BIS traffic I will get it next time I see myself going outside the US.

The $20/mo BB option does include unlimited email. Works just like it does here. Diff. is you would pay for data. With TM, you only pay for the time period you use it. IOW, 10 days would cost about $7. You need to call them to activate it, and call or go online to cancel
it when you get back (unless you gave them a stop date when you turned it on.)

...mike

Well for my needs there is no point in using it, as I won't be saving much by having just e-mail be 'included' as even images within the messages don't count as those aren't pushed. HTML alone is not a whole lot of data unless you have say hundreds of e-mails being pushed to the phone daily. Web surfing and instant messaging take up more bandwidth due to overhead and images with the case of web pages.

CallInEurope offers a BlackBerry option but it's pretty expensive (something like 3$/day) for anything over a week just in the country your SIM is assigned to and I think it doesn't include non-BIS data, so that would be charged extra at the usual high roaming rates.

ATT's plan does include on device data, but requires a one year commitment. If you are on a Blackberry enterprise plan on device data is functionally included on many of these plans because the carrier can't see what data is going back to your company server. They can, however, see the megabytes. If you do a little IMing or surfing on the device, it will fly through the system. Tethering the device and downloading your favorite movie from Bit Torrent is a different story.