Sorry if this has been posted before - I did a quick search but nothing jumped out at me. I inherited the responsibility for our BBs and BES. We have a support contract with Cingular. We pay close to $1,000/yr for it. Whenever we have a BES issue, we have to go through Cingular, who eventually patches us through to RIM. This can sometimes take up to an hour, which is extremely ineffective time-wise and extremely frustrating. Is there any reason to keep our support contract with Cingular? Is there something they can do for us that RIM can't? I can get Tx2 annual support for $1,300/yr. This seems like a no-brainer to me.......

Any thoughts, opinions, experiences to share?
TIA!
Marcia

The carriers are just about useless on BES issues. They only support their end of the network and maybe a bit of what goes on with the handsets

Things Cingular can do which RIM can't.
Provision handhelds.
Issue a replacement handheld.

That is all.

We use TMO as our primary carrier. I call them and throw a couple of "scary" (basically blackberry enterprise server) words and they immediately send me over RIM. I go from business customer care to pda support, then to RIM. It's typically pretty quick. We pay nothing to Tmobile or RIM yet get only a very small delay getting directly to RIM. For me to contact RIM directly, t-support would cost several thousand per year.

Thanks for all of your responses. Cchatagnier, you're lucky you can get through to RIM so quickly. Cingular gives us the 3rd degree before patching us through.

I haven't had my coffee yet this morning, so please don't flame me. Just to make sure I've got this all straight in my head, Cingular would deal with network and handheld issues, provision and/or replace a device whether we had a support contract with them or not - correct?

Thanks again!

Cingular wanted to charge me $999 to upgrade my BES to 4.1. We were RIM TSupport customers, and got it free from them. I have also found that if I open a trouble ticket directly with RIM Support, I get an answer within an hour or so. My Cingular rep takes DAYS sometimes to even acknowledge my question.

If you have TSupport you should be calling RIM directly - never the carrier. That's the point of paying for it - and the free server upgrades...

We are still rolling out the handhelds, so I have to deal with the carrier to get my handhelds. When I had them on the phone I asked about the server upgrade. And by the way, they did not mention that I got it free from T Support. They were more then willing to take my money!!

So buyer beware...

Again, thank you all for your imput. I did some investigating and found out that we paid Cingular for the BES upgrade (from 2.2 to 4.0), not for a tech support contract. So even though that was a little cheaper than getting it free (but paying more) from T Support, I'd rather pay the extra money and deal directly with RIM.

Have a great holiday!