[Pete6]

I was asked today by the manager of the local carrier store (yes really) what were the minimum requirements for allowing IM and MSN traffic on a Blackberry.

There is a local International school nerby and a number of students have BlackBerrys because of the big screen and proper keyboard. Most of them seem to have pre-paid SIM cards.

The kids keep coming into the store asking how to do IM and MSN on these phones. Note that email is not a requirement here - wrong generation.

The manager recognised me from my erstwhile Crackberry photo avatar (glad that's gone).

Since I siged up for the whole BlackBerry data plan, I get email and Internet services.

My question is, will IM and MSnN work without BIS and the email package.

Exactly what is required to make this work please.

Next step, get CrackMem into my carrier and then, the world....

[kyriefurro]

My question is, will IM and MSnN work without BIS and the email package.

Exactly what is required to make this work please.

Pete,

My understanding is that this is controlled by the carrier. So your store manager should probably call his parent company and talk to someone there to get the exact details.

As I'm sure you know, here in the US most of the "native" IM clients - the ones that are provided by the carrier - use SMS and count against your texting limits. Each IM sent is one text, and each one received is an additional text. Needless to say you can use up your texting allowance very quickly.

It seems that most third party IM clients use data, and you need a data plan to make them work. Each IM is pretty small though, so I can't imagine you'd need very much just for IM's. It's the internet browsing with all the pictures that uses most of your data.

So, to answer your question, they need some sort of IM client and they need either a texting plan or a data plan to support the client.

[Pete6]

Thanks for your reply.

What this guy (and I) do not fully understand is given that there is an IM client of some sort (not the Blackberry one) what is the minimum data plan required to make it work.

Swisscom unbundles its services so that I could have email and no Internet access or vice versa or, as I have, both.

The manager has had no help from his people and so he asked me.

I can see me having to take a minimal data plan for a month here to test the priniciple.

switzerland is a small country and the French speaking part where I live is even smaller so if I can help these guys out it my come back to me one day. Especially since I am English mother tounge and most here are native French speakers.

[kyriefurro]

Thanks for your reply.

What this guy (and I) do not fully understand is given that there is an IM client of some sort (not the Blackberry one) what is the minimum data plan required to make it work.

Yeah, you'd almost need an app to monitor IM use so you could come up with an average file size per message. And then you'd have to estimate how many IM's someone would usually send in a given period. And then pad that number to allow for individual usage patterns.

A single IM can't be much more than 10k or so, at the most. Can it? lol

I'm betting someone's already done this, but it's probably all tied up with some companies proprietary info, so it's not public.

[Pete6]

You may be right. I will have to have a look to see if there are any 'general purpose' IMs out there.

I can see several of these VERY rich kids wanting upgrades to OS 4.5, You Tube, IM, all sorts of stuff.

My own son went to one of these schools and the amount of money there is obscene.

Maybe I can help little Jimmy upgrade his phone...

[kyriefurro]

Not sure how much this helps, but Verizon lets me see my data usage on my bill, broken out into chunks. They obviously do some consolidating in their reporting, not per message/connection. And their reporting time doesn't match my phone, so I can't be 100% sure which period is which. But here's an example from my phone...

On June 15, I had an IM conversation with a friend - I was using Beejive and she was using her PC. We exchanged a total of 74 messages over half an hour, from 9:09a until 9:38a. My TOTAL usage for the day was just 209k, and that included emails, web, etc. There's a period of time that was report at 10:27a on my bill that *probably* corresponds to the IM's, and that period used just 38k. Also, the total for the entire day includes 102k that was used at 3am which is when I've got the phone set to auto-reboot. So active use was ~107k for the entire day.

Not exactly precise data, but hopefully this helps a touch.