Gaps in BlackBerry BIS provisioning exposed

Rating: If the professionals can’t get it right …

Here in the UK, GoMo News is not so sure that RIM can actually cope with the unexpectedly high demand for its services from the consumer sector – rather than its traditional customer that is the business user. We’re basing our case for this claim on the absolute chaos which seems to ensue when ordinary consumers attempt to migrate their existing mobile telephony requirements over to a RIM/BlackBerry based platform. Such people aren’t governed by a network manager who provisions mobile devices on a company-wide basis. These are standard folk who try to put an existing SIM inside a handset which just happens to be built by RIM rather than Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson. They know nothing about BIS (BlackBerry Internet Services).We first came across this phenomenon when a young lady – Miss L – bought a BlackBerry handset from a high street retailer.

She couldn’t understand why BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) wouldn’t work.

Actually, the Internet wasn’t provisioned either but it looked like it was given that there was a Wi-fi connexion.

All it took was a phone call to the network operator and the handset was provisioned as a BlackBerry.

We’ve subsequently learnt that the way to tell if the handset is correctly provisioned as a BlackBerry is when the symbols in the top right hand corner of the BlackBerry become uppercase – i.e. GPRS or 3G.

The next BlackBerry we came across still hasn’t been cured because its owner was sold the entirely wrong tariff.

We’ve been trying to text FREE 6 MONTH BB to 441 to get free BBM. That should provide BBM free for six months.

Nothing has happened so far. Notice it’s MONTH (singular) and BB not BBM. This offer applies to those on the T-Mobile UK network.

In desperation we ordered a new special ‘BlackBerry ready’ SIM from T-Mobile.

When we put the SIM card in the BlackBerry, the network didn’t recognise it as a BlackBerry and took £1 off for internet access.

A call to 150 finally got the situation rectified. Apparently we should have waited for the correct greetings messages to arrive.

Finally – because by this time GoMo News had built up a reputation for fixing BBM for regular folk – we found a young lady whose BlackBerry couldn’t receive emails but could send them.

It turned out that the retailer had thought that Yahoo! mail was identical to Hotmail and had provisioned it incorrectly.

The solution was to delete all email setting and start again.

We’re not sure about this but we also went onto Yahoo! mail and – from the Settings menu – ensured that POP3 forwarding was switched on.

It makes us wonder just how many other UK BlackBerries are still only able to make voice calls?