Yeah knotty's crazy plan is a good one. Ok it could be other things but honestly it's virtually always the carrier. If language is the barrier (often the case over here), see if you can get someone to help you, so they translate exactly what you say to the carrier's c/s drone in real time, coz that can make all the difference.

When you have hit or miss activations in Europe it will be down to the dataplan or the location of the user at the time (signal strength). As Jadey and knotty said, the location should make no difference to the technology, we all have users all over the world activated fine against BESs which RIM would cry about if they knew . I usually find that it's issues with dataplans or location that cause individual issues. Compare that to the US where we tend to stick to two carriers nationwide and have fairly consistant locations, and we have zero issues with activations.

Basically, assume the carrier is wrong coz the BES will probably be fine and dandy :->.