[ssadowski]

I got my new Curve last Friday (Feb 8) after not having carried one for just over 18 months (blasphemy, I know). I finally realized my Samsung t629 (great quad-band phone, btw for being /just/ a phone) - I finally caved and realized I needed one to help keep in touch with work/appointments/etc. I was leery of a blackberry, given the last one I'd carried was a 7520, but I'd heard good things about both the 81xx (Pearl), that my sister carries, and the new 83xx (Curve) series, so having researched the two, as well as the 8800 for about a week, I decided that the Curve was the one that would best fit me, and trucked off to a TMo retail store to get one in early afternoon.

Knowing exactly what I wanted, I got the packages added to my account that I was told were necessary (Blackberry Unlimited) and Hotspot@Home for UMA calling. I was told it may take up to two hours for service provisioning for the data though calling would work immediately. but I transferred my SIM card and MicroSD card in with no problem.

So here the nightmare begins: My old standard loadout on my prior blackberries included MidpSSH, Opera Mini, and Weatherbug. The new applications I've added are WorldMate Live (for travel itineraries and notifications), JabberMixClient to do XMPP with the corporate Jabber server, and Funambol to sync with the Funambol Server. The two hours had passed and /none/ of these applications worked, however the built in applications did: BB Browser, E-mail through BIS, and the IM programs. All of this was very frustrating. I figured I'd wait a few more hours and try again, just to make sure. I double-checked my APN (for BBs on TMo US with the BB plans it is wap.voicestream.com, for reference) and all of my apps were getting the error message "Unable to Open Tunnel."

I called TMo and got through to their blackberry support and explained my problem. The tech was friendly, but she said the clerk at the store had set the services up incorrectly, and for raw internet support, I needed the BES service. I asked about the Hotspot@Home, too, and it turned out he just set up the T-Mobile Hotspot service - which I didn't need. So she changed out the service and said that she knew how important it was for their business customers up and running, she re-provisioned the phone while I was there, forcing the service changes through. The only way that I can verify that she did this is that the blackberry was re-registered on the network about 45 seconds after she did the service push. She said that the data change could take up to two hours to go through, just like the tech at the store said, so I agreed to test two hours later (it still wasn't working while I was on the phone) and call them back if I needed more help.

Well, friday night rolled around and I'm not a stay-at-home kind of guy. My e-mail was working, and that was good enough for the time being. I doubted I was going to immediately need any of the other features. Saturday morning, none of my applications were working yet: still the strange 'could not open tunnel' errors in various forms. I called back and explained my problem to the tech there, who troubleshot with me as best she could, and then decided it was a problem with the BB itself, and conferenced in a RIM tech. After a bit of discussion with the RIM tech, he told me (to my prior assumption and obvious displeasure) that it was a problem with the TMo Service, not the device itself. The device was doing exactly what it was supposed to do when it couldn't get out through the APN.

So I the RIM tech transferred me back to TMo and I explained what they had told me, and the girl went through the checklist of service items again, and decided that no, I didn't need the BES service as I wasn't using BES, and yadda yadda yadda re-provision, wait two hours, try again.

Notice a trend?

Sunday morning, same problem. Still no raw internet, so of course I call back, and am told this time that it is an application error... with all of the third party applications. Obviously, TMo doesn't support those, so I must contact each vendor and get support through them. No matter what I said I could not get this tech to understand that it was a data service issue and not an application issue. I spent thirty minutes on the phone trying to get to a more senior tech, to explain data services to this girl, but she was so set on her script that I couldn't do anything about it. By the way, this was a "I am the manager, sir, you can't speak to anyone else," call. I just about lost it and finally said thank you and hung up.

Monday morning, I tried again. I was within my 14 days to take back the phone for any reason, and I figured that after three days, if the thing wasn't working, I'd take it back. There was no point in having a blackberry just to read my email - I could do that on my t629. Lo and behold, it worked. Near as I can figure, the phone itself was fine - the service either takes a **** of a lot longer than two hours to provision for data access properly, or someone screwed up somewhere and the account was fixed.

So that's my TMo nightmare. The solution to get Funambol (and other raw-internet access apps) working is simple: you don't really have to do anything except wait.

I should point out that throughout all of this, TMo's techs were polite and from what I could tell, doing everything they could to get my Curve working. The problem was that they were either not trained properly or were misinformed themselves concerning the nature of the data plan. This is both good and bad, I think: TMo customer service has yet to let me down, even when I get frustrated, in a service capacity - but in a technical capacity, they seem to be sorely lacking.

[Hazysky]

Glad the nightmare came to an end, as for Customer Services it seems to be par for the course with most of them! Took me over a week to get The PIN relased from the BIS account of the seller that I purchased my pearl from. (Think they thought we were talking about the PIN security code).

Welcome to CB

[jeffkoz]

sorry to hear about your bad luck. The times I have had to call in for bb support if I didn't get the help I needed I just got bumped up to tier 2 w/o an issue.

Hope you have better luck in the future.

[ssadowski]

Thanks guys. Now that everything is working, I'm sure my experience will be much better!

[artemis125]

Wow, that totally sucked. I was told that my bb network services would take up to 24hrs to activate but it was up and running before I left the store.

[jktrinnaman]

Took my service 1.5 days to become active on the T-Mo network. Fortunately, I had only looked like a fool posting here twice for help rather than going through the support headache. Glad it's working for you now.

[shovelgrrrl]

It took T-Mobile over three days for everything on my phone to be good to go - after numerous calls to tech support, someone finally told me that it takes "up to 4 days" depending on your location, type of phone, services, etc. If they'd just say that in the beginning, it would have saved a lot of frustration. -B

[wnm]

That is a nightmare. I had mine up and running in under an hour.

[hearmeoutx]

That is a nightmare. I had mine up and running on my 8320 when I got it, and my 8900 within about 45 minutes of taking them home.

[abraham]

mine was up and running before i left the store as well......but glad all is fixed.