[Berryessa]

Greetings! I checked and have not found this exact problem on the board yet. If I missed it (as a newbie), please feel free to redirect me. My situation is this:

I have a Cingular Blue (AT&T) account with BB service in California and, for my business travels in Europe, a Vodafone account with BB service in Germany. Cingular works off a 32K sim and Vodafone off a 64K sim. I am using an unlocked 8700c (i.e. US Cingular version) and, as a backup, a Nokia 6310i (regular quadband GSM phone).

When put into the Nokia cellphone, both sim cards work fine in the US and in Germany: For either in Automatic Network Selection mode, Cingular comes up in the US and Vodafone in Germany. The same holds true for the 8700c.
All services are available for the BB here and there and everything is OK.

Now, when you travel in Europe outside of Germany (I have experienced this in Belgium, France and England consistently) this is what happens with the 8700c: With the Cingular card it picks up a roaming partner immediately (O2 if present) and works as it should. With the Vodafone card, it picks up nothing (!) and a scan of available networks produces nothing as well. This is consistent. This is where it becomes interesting, though: If I place the Vodafone card into my Nokia cellphone it picks up, say, SFR in France. When I *now* place the Vodafone card with SFR as the recent roaming partner into my 8700c and set the latter to manual network selection, it will select SFR and work perfectly.

Perfectly, that is, until you hit a dead spot (say on the Metro) at which point it will not reconnect automatically to the network (or, rather, it gives up too soon).

So, it would seem it is not a network or account restriction (or the neither BB nor cellphone would work at all), nor does it seem to be a defective SIM card (or the problems would exist in Germany as well) or defective hardware.

Customer service for either service is only marginally helpful. The best I can come up with as a theory is this: The cellphone works because it does not transmit the IMEI number and the local provider simply recognizes Cingular and Vodafone.de as acceptable roaming partners. The BB does, however, transmit the IMEI-number and the local providers will accept roaming calls from foreign providers only from the foreign providers hardware (8700v in the case of Vodafone, I guess).

Does anyone here have any knowledge/ideas of what is going on? Much obliged.