The company I work for have 60+ BlackBerries being used in the states, Germany, and even in China on a fairly permanent basis. All are either 7100t or 7105t, each connected to our BES.

Our HQ is in the states, and all our phones have been purchased locally and distributed by us to various field locations including Germany. For the German units, we later realized that if we purchased SIMs from the same carrier in Germany, we ended up saving a bit of cash by eliminating roaming charges for calls back here to the states, not to mention the savings on local calls the field reps were having to make.

The first hurdle towards applying this in China, was finding out that the RIM made BES is "non-discriminatory" for service provider so long as the SIM in the unit is capable of transporting the appropriate data.

I've already got confirmation that our contracted provider will unlock as many phones as we ask them too (but they won't give me the knowledge of how to do it, they do it for us....but that's another story) enabling us to purchase China SIM cards with China cellular service. This stands to give us a HUGE savings in phone cost because of no longer being billed for roaming charges, and we get the same BES service as if we were here in the states. (You gotta love this stuff)

But the question is, what programing does a cellular provider need to put on a SIM so that when placed in a 7100t BlackBerry, it can connect to our BES?

In other words, I don't expect the guy behind the counter at the Chinese cellular office to fully understand the BES issue (seeing as I think there are some restrictions on that there), and need to be able to "educate" one of our less technical people on site as to what to ask the service sales rep to include as service provisions on the SIM cards he gets from them.

I hope that made sense.....


Anyway, any advice (or specific details) will be greatly appreciated.



Thanks,

Chuck

Chuck,

Good to see you made it this far... I believe that you will need to make sure that the carrier you select can provide data connectivity to the Blackberry network.

I think this simply means "A data plan" is required. Beyond that, maybe someone else can provide more info... if there is any.

Good luck.