I am travelling internationally and have upgraded to Cingular's international unlimited data roaming for $65/mo. All I am interested in doing is sending/receiving e-mails, not making/receiving voice calls. When I signed up for the plan, the Cingular rep told me that any call that I receive (even if I don't answer and it goes to voicemail) will be charged for roaming.

My question is this... Can I somehow disable the voice portion of my 8700c and only do data while I am overseas? I don't really need my voice line, nor do I want to pay $2/minute each time someone leaves me a voicemail. I see there is a "do not disturb" feature on my phone, but my guess is this is nothing more than "ignoring" a call to send it straight into voicemail, and hence, get charged for roaming.

My friend in that situation went to drastic measures: he told his wireless provider remove voicemail feature from his account. That, and 'do not disturb,' made it work for him.

He wanted to keep voice for emergencies.

If you do not need voice plan on your blackberry just sign for data plan.

I think what you need to do is ask them to disable forwarding to your voicemail for the time you are away.

You should be able to disable forwarding to voicemail from your handheld. Go to Phone then to Options then to Call Forwarding then change the 'If Busy', 'If No Answer' and 'If Unreachable' to 'Do Not Forward' - or selecting 'Forward All Calls' and 'Do Not Forward' as the option should work as well.

With that said, some carriers will charge 1 minute to you if your phone or voicemail does not pick up within 30 seconds. You may want to find out from Cingular if they are one of these carriers. This used to be a big issue with people who started using entire songs as their ringtones and configured their total ring time to move past 30-60 seconds.