AT&T Blackberry Personal Unlimited Plan question related to BES

[watson524]

Hi all,

My company runs BES and I have a T Mobile device from them which is basically a brick due to signal issues in my area. Corporately they are thinking of changing plans/providers/devices. I know someone in the IT group and they currently aren't testing a Torch and I said I'd test for them if they would change my BES license from my company owned device to my personal device (they wouldn't set up two devices for me because it would incur server license charges on their end).

My question is this.... I have the unlimited blackberry data plan (because I had an old iPhone unlimited plan that they just rolled over). It's $30 / month. Can I use that for a BES setup or am I going to get charged more?

thanks!

[b4k3d]

I have a bb on At&t set up exactly as you have explained and all i pay is $30, So from what I understand you are good to go with the $30 plan and won't incure extra charges.

[watson524]

sweet! the "personal" part of the name of the plan threw me off. Especially when I saw an "enterprise 2gb" plan.

thanks!

[bigsteveatt]

Originally Posted by watson524

sweet! the "personal" part of the name of the plan threw me off. Especially when I saw an "enterprise 2gb" plan.

thanks!

That is incorrect. The BES plans are separate and you won't be able to activate it on a BIS plan. That means you'd have to change your data plan, which means you lose unlimited.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[watson524]

crap... well this isn't good news.

[bigsteveatt]

Yeah. I was trying to use a hosted BES account, but couldn't justify the extra 10 bucks a month.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[watson524]

grrr.... this is one of the only drawbacks i see at this point to having left my iphone behind.... no activesync.

i have been trying to get notifysync to work for the trial but it is telling me that my server does not support any of the eas versions that notifysync requires..... it's MSE 2007 so it should be fine.

[b4k3d]

Sorry I'm in an airport and i responded too fast and wasn't clear with my response. I pay $30 on my personal account attached to my companies BES. All it took was a phone call to customer service and I was allowed to continue to pay $30 a month instead of the $40.

[watson524]

huh.... well that's worth a shot then maybe. i did just get notifysync working but not sure i want to pay for it. and i think it didn't get all calendar items so i have to look into that.

[watson524]

No go on that... don't know how you did it, but they wanted know part of it when I talked to the first person and 2 managers. $45 / month would keep me with unlimited and switch to BES or 2GB BES for $40 / month.

[Mister Xiado]

You can get an AT&T Torch anywhere you like, get it unlocked for $1.50 online, and use it with your T-Mobile SIM, but you'll only get EDGE.

Your BES admin can change your PIN and IMEI over to the new phone, and T-Mobile can do the same in their administration tools, even if it's an AT&T BlackBerry. Doesn't matter.

Now, if you're GOING to AT&T, there's only one way to get unlimited data for a smartphone. No, it does not require talking to a supervisor.

[watson524]

Thanks for the info but T Mobile is horrendous around me... very often SOS only so that's not an option for me. I've been with AT&T since before they were AT&T the first time (13+ years)... I have an unlimited data plan since they carried it from my iPhone days but it's the BES part of it I'm getting hosed on.

[Mister Xiado]

Ding ding ding, correct. The iPhone is the key.

Unlimited data with BES service is $45 per month. That's not sooo much. If you work for a company that has a BES server, odds are you're not being paid slave wages, so your phone bill shouldn't be a colossal burden... unless you have a double mortgage and two car loans.

[watson524]

The phone bill wouldn't be a colossal burden and I don't get paid slave wages but I also don't support pi$$ing money away for no reason just because I have it. I need to determine the cost to value ratio since for free, I can access my company OWA account via BIS and sync the calendar through BB DM. Or even pay $120 the first year and $30 each year thereafter to use NotifySync (which I am evaluating now and working through a few glitches with their support team). I subscribe to the theory of "just because I can, doesn't mean I should".