vB Easy Archive - Bring Your Own Access -- Blackberry on cell networks that does not do Blackberry

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Bring Your Own Access -- Blackberry on cell networks that does not do Blackberry
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Posted by: Mark Rejhon

I have discovered few number of people are doing a "Bring Your Own Access" technique to get Blackberry email on prepaid SIM cards and other cellphone plans. This appears to be possible on other carriers.

1. Your SIM does not need to be Blackberry provisioned.
2. Your SIM card MUST have a GPRS data plan (preferably unlimited)
3. You must buy a 3rd party BES/MDS hosting service
4. You will get NO BWC.
5. Your push email will come from an Exchange mailbox instead rather than BWC.
6. You do, get access to Internet apps such as WebMessenger.

This is a technique that makes Blackberry email on Fido possible, as well as on other cellphone networks not equipped for Blackberry; as long as they have full GPRS data capability.

I need to hear from more other people who are using Blackberry in this particular manner.

Posted by: Mark Rejhon

Gothalyptic's post (on BlackberryClub) about him using a non-Blackberry plan and it successfully with BES/MDS was the impetus of me starting research on this, and this is why I post this message to solicit more users who are using "Bring Your Own Access" technique with the Blackberry, because, apparently, it does work in certian cases at least. I am trying to research under which cases this works.

Perhaps it only works with existing carriers that already enables the Blackberry APN even on their non-Blackberry plans. Fido is supposedly a special case since they did enable the Blackberry APN but never commercialized it.

Also, with international roaming, sometimes I am able to roam my Blackberry onto cellphone companies that doesn't even offer Blackberry, yet my Blackberry email works. What happens in these cases? Maybe they added access to the APN because of their roaming relationships?

It does need to be tested out: Which carriers allows generic access to Blackberry's own network? Does the configurable APN in the TCP/IP setup in Options on BlackberryOS 4.0 allow bypassing the need to use a Blackberry-specific APN?

Questions that need to be answered in the course of testing and experimenting, and existing users' experiences.

Posted by: Mark Rejhon

Further information that I have received from Aquiname on RIMROAD indicates a potential trespassing issue with the BYOA concept -- because you still have to go through a carrier-side Blackberry gateway even before you reach a BWC server or a BES server. This is the usual hierarchy for the push email.

Quote:

Blackberry ->
Carrier-side Blackberry gateway (Blackberry APN) ->
Carrier-side Blackberry Web Client

If you decided to try to bypass the BWC server by BYOA (Bring Your Own Access) with a third party BES service, you still end up with:

Quote:

Blackberry ->
Carrier-side Blackberry gateway (Blackberry APN) ->
Internet-side Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES/MDS Hosting service)

As a result, it seems like one would now be trespassing a carrier-side Blackberry gateway when one attempted BYOA (Bring Your Own Access). It also indicates Blackberry functionality is likely not possible on networks that don't have a Blackberry-specific gateway, although technically RIM could make Blackberry work (albiet less reliably) over non-Blackberry gateways due to problems with varying IP addresses and the connectionless protocol that Blackberry uses for push email.

Another question is why Blackberry sometimes work on some cell networks that don't even support Blackberry. This is probably because of special cases where the network has set up a Blackberry gateway, but not deployed Blackberries. It would seem that this would probably be considered 'trespassing' by the carrier themselves, even when connecting to a third-party BES server.

It would be really nice to hear an official word from RIM themselves to clarify.

Posted by: Mark Rejhon

Newer technologies such as iDEN network (Nextel) which allow static IP addresses and some 3G systems support incoming addressability (i.e. static IP addresses, etc) that makes push email much easier without requiring a Blackberry specific gateway. So it is possible that BYOA won't be a can of worms, for those people who choose to BYOA, and carriers/RIM is far more likely to not mind because of the clear BYOA distinction since both would still profit either way.