Why does it look like my 8830 getting wifi?

Bear with me here, I wish I could give you pictures of these screens... I just found something odd...

First, at my office, we have a Netgear WAP that has WEP enabled.

Second, I have two browsers on my 8830 - the built-in and Opera.

The story... while reading my RSS feeds this morning, I saw an article about people seeing a huge jump in speed on the AT&T network overnight - presumably for the iPhone launch today. What piqued my interest was a link to DSLReports (dslreports.com/mspeed) where, you guessed it, you can test download speeds.

I fired up the built-in browser and was greeted with a message that said something to the effect of "test NOT compatible with blackberry browsers". Below that were a few links including one that said "your IP" so I hit that up, thinking I would use opera to test in a few minutes.

The IP that came back is one of the 5 statics for my offices dual T-1's. I know this because I run the network. The DNS is from our T-1 provider as well. How can this be? It would imply that there is somehow a connection between my 8830 and the building network. The IP, by the way, is one of the public statics we have here that corresponds to our DHCP server.

I thought this odd, but the need to know what kind of speed I could get was more important so I fired up Opera and went to the same address. The download test ran and showed me at about 207KB... not bad... what's the IP I wonder... it's a 195.189 address.

I thought this a fluke so I went back to the bberry browser and checked again - sure enough, it pulled my office ISP information again.

Still being skeptical, I thought to my self "self, you have a web server, access it with your blackberry and then look at the apache logs". So I did just that... guess what...

x.x.x.x - - [29/Jun/2007:05:46:48 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 880 "-" "BlackBerry8830/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105"

Yup... the x.x.x.x was the same IP address DSLReports showed, and the very same IP as the public interface of our DHCP server.

WTF?

Does your BB use BES for internet or does it use BIS? If BES it must be using your enterprise server for internet access.

I am running a BES here - I was not aware that it used that as a proxy for net access... curious why Opera would not then go through the BES as well.

You are using MDS through BES. It kind of acts like a proxy server. You don't really need MDS anymore. If you switch your browser to the "Internet Browser" it will use your providers network and not go through MDS anymore. I believe that only the "Blackberry Browser" uses MDS. If you turn of MDS on BES then the BB browser won't work but the Internet browser will.

... and so it is... you learn something new everyday. Thanks for this information... I just switched over to "Internet Browser" and it shows a 216. address and "blackberry.net" for DNS.

Thanks, I was starting to wonder if Verizon had done some odd voodoo on the 8830's and secretly enabled wifi with wep-cracking at the same time they crippled GPS :)