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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:18:17+00:00

I was told by a consultant in a 3 hours discussion that basically blackberry

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I was told by a consultant in a 3 hours discussion that basically blackberry 3rd party apps (Distributed through AppWorld or not) cannot perform any network I/O outside of North America without becoming an alliance member. Is this true?

Basically the story is that only North America can make use of APN connection, anywhere else in the world you have to rely on BIS for your network connection. And the network connection over BIS can only be made to a server that is provisioned by RIM. You will have to become and alliance member in order to have your server provisioned.

This sounds kinda silly to me, because if I am a third party developer I cannot do network io at all outside of NA. That’s a huge limitation on the AppWorld developers!

I’m not talking about a network socket over Wifi connection, only concerned with network connectivity over the cell network.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I think that you may have been misinformed, or perhaps munging a couple of issues.

    You can set up APN for many carriers:
    http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Connect-to-Internet-with-Your-BlackBerry-without-Paying-For-Data-Plan
    http://www.blackberryfaq.com/index.php/Carrier_specific_APN/TCP_settings

    This is not “Blackberry Data Services”, which do seem to have some restriction based on the carrier’s provisioning. Some applications – Verichat and Berry411 are mentioned in the above links – are clearly not restricted to the Blackberry Data Services, though, so I think that would be a bit overgeneralized to say -all- third party applications. (Perhaps the consultant meant third party applications that integrate with Exchange/BES have to go over a BIS link? Or applications that require a secure interface?)

    I also think it’s not quite fair to say “outside of North America,” as such services are clearly in use in the EU and India, at least, where various providers (O2, Vodafone) sell Blackberrys to actual customers.

    I haven’t used a Blackberry in several years, but even in my days there was a differentiation between Blackberry data and TCP data sent to the internet, with Opera being a ubiquitous example of a non-Blackberry connection.

    Of the three answerers, we seem skeptical, and as far as I can tell none of us has been able to find anything to back up the consultant’s claim, and indeed have found several counterpoints that seem to indicate the issue is at least incompletely understood. Have you considered asking the consultant via e-mail to clarify?

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