310-890
 

I have a TMO 7290 and where I live I don't get any service. Came home from a trip the other day and forgot to turn the radio off (normally do that to save battery), left the 7290 by the window and heard it vibrate and beep (incomming e-mail). Thought it was pretty strange for it to be working at home (normally loose service about 8 miles from my house).

Look at the screen and saw network 310-890, GPRS and a couple of bars of signal.

Who the heck is 310-890?
What carrier is that?

Steve

Not, sure but I pick it up in rural areas north of Spokane, WA. It's pretty common from my experience.

It's Rural Cellular Corporation dba Unicel. They used to be part of Cellular One and made a switch a couple years ago to Unicel. I'm in Klamath Falls, Oregon and, thankfully, they have great service all over Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon. If they weren't here my T-Mobile BB would be worthless to me.

SWEET!! Thanks Jibi!! I searched all over the net one time looking for that info. All I could find was that 310 was US.

I caught this MNC once in rural Indiana, and thought it peculiar that my SIM did not know how to hash it out. I soon realized that it was not a preferred roaming partner and that they just had an open network. As soon as my phone could grab the weak T-M signal, it would. It was really annoying because Unicel had perfect coverage where I was, and I couldn't hold them because they were not a preferred partner.

You should be able to hold it if you switch it to manual. That's what I do with my 7100t. They are on the 850MHz band. Signal isn't quite as clear but coverage is excellent. Also, according to the T-Mobile rep that our company uses, there is a roaming agreement between T-Mobile and Unicel. Your phone just always defaults back to TMobile if you don't lock it on manually.

Yeah, it wouldn't do it... I was using a Nokia 1100 (850/1900) at the time, and switching to manual would cause me to lose my service altogether because it would find a T-M signal, drop the Unicel signal, and wait for me to pick again. This caused me to miss most calls. I finally just left it on automatic, and would manually pick Unicel when I needed to make a call.

I've never had any luck manually switching networks with any Nokia phone. The BlackBerry was the first phone I ever had that would actually do it.

thanks guys - cleared that one up for me. All of a sudden I'm getting a weak (2 bars) signal at my house with GPRS when I never used to. TMO stops about 8 miles up the road.

I do have to have the berry by a window but it does seem to work.
(I'm in Deering NH btw - normally, the only signal here is VZW).

I just got back from a "road trip" from Miami fl<=>No NY
Had to do some serious playing to get my 8700c on TMO to lock onto "unicel".
ie; yanked batt/soft boots-finnally after a bit it just CAME ALIVE... Does anybody knows how to get the BB to recognize a prf roam nework without such a fuss?
I was picking up EDGE but it wasnt as fast as TMO's or Cing's networks.

I also had the same problem in the Carolinas, On I-95 heading NorthI held a cingular signal throughout both states,heading north, but when coming back I had an "X "next to cing when doing a manual search. Had some carrier 310-xxx that I didnt recognize and GPRS. Pretty wild...
Anybody able to shine any light?