[znino]

I've been using a BB 8100 for the past couple of months on the Fido network. This was a Rogers branded phone but unlocked. Since Fido did not offer any BB service I was simply using it as a nice phone/PDA for voice and sms.

Fido recently added BB Connect service to their offerings. They currently only support a Nokia phone for this but I asked them if i could add it to my 8100 and they said "probably will work". Great answer! So I had them add a data plan and registered for Blackberry connect and what do you know? It works.

I have 2 email accounts pushed to my 8100 now and I can use BB messenger and other web functions.

The big issue however is Fido's data plans are crazy expensive. Their lowest plan is $40 for 7Mb. I am not sure how that is going to stand up to my email traffic! We have no competition in Canada as Fido is owned by the only other GSM carrier Rogers! I'd love to know if there is any way to monitor (with a counter on the 8100?) the data usage on the phone.

I also don't know how Fido handles data on the blackbery connect plan when I am in the US. Does the usage come off of my plan or is there a separate roaming cost for data. Nobody at Fido seems to know of give me straight answers. I even had one incompetent today telling me that if i roam in the US, when I use data it will come off my voice plan, depending on how much TIME I am using the data for! Can you believe it???? Unfortunately, their voice plans are way better than their parent company Rogers or I would switch in a second!

The last thing I've noticed with this Blackberry connect is that emails pushed to me do not come in that fast. Somewhere between 4 and 12 minutes. Not that great at all. Other friends that have true Blackberry service (BES etc) get their emails instantly.

If anyone else has activated BB Connect with Fido and hs any comments or venting on the above, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks.

[mike_187]

yah i added it too, i got a lower plan 25 for 3mb, and thats enough if im using email only since emails are really small (2-4 kb usually). for web browsing yurs can probably suit you if you do very little on top of your emails.

i believe if you take the device to US it will work just fine except for the fact that you will be paying 5c/kb on the data u use.

[scanido]

Interesting thread!

So Fido now has Blackberry Service awesome!!!

Currently I have an Unlocked BB Pearl on Fido, would I be able to use the BB Connect service?

How do i setup my emails to get pushed to my Blackberry. Please help me I am totally dumbfounded by all this technology.

Thanks,
Steve

[znino]

Hey Scanido...

Well my setup was pretty straightforward actually. I added a BB data plan on the phone with Fido Customer service. Then you go to fido.blackberry.com and register a username/pw. Then you add the email addresses you want to have pushed to you and voila! You wait like 15 minutes and then your email starts coming in and all the required applications are added to your phone. If you do it and need help you can always ask. Glad to see I was not the only one who wanted an unlocked Pearl to use as a good phone but still hoping for push email! Where did you get your unlocked Pearl?

Mike_187...I had not seen that 3Mb plan. You say emails are pretty small yet when i look at a lot of them in my outlook, many of them are more like 10K even without much text. Do you know if BB somehow compresses emails they send you or something? Maybe a smaller plan would work if that's the case. I wish there was a way to show a data counter on this phone. I have not found one yet and I've asked the question but nobody has answered yet.

Ya, 5c a Kb extra. what a Rip. We are totally being raped here on data. I have firends in the US that pay a flat $40 fee for unlimited data (emails and web). That's what we need here!

[mike_187]

yes the bb compresses emails, also converts html and rich text formats to plain text email, which makes them very small.

[znino]

cool. Compressing emails should help keep usage smaller. Still would be nice to have a resettable data counter on this thing! I can't believe it doesn't have one (or does it???). I've had a ton of much less sophisticated phones with that feature. I guess they all want us to use data as much as possible without a way to tone it down so that the carriers can make more money!

It would also be nice if there were more elaborate filters possible with BIS so that one could, for example, not forward emails to the phone during certain times. I don't need emails going to my phone while I sleep, for example. My PC inbox is fine for that!

[toemaytoe]

Are you telling me that any blackberry gsm phone will work with the fido connect plan? I have a fido city plan for voice ($40 per month unlimited) that I use with a razr phone and I have an unlocked blackberry 8700g that I use on a month to month plan with rogers for data only. I would vastly prefer to have everything on the one device but I was told by fido that I had to use the specific nokia phone for blackberry connect to work. I would sure like to get this straightened out. Thanks.

[znino]

Hey toemaytoe, I was exactly in the same situation as you. City Fido plan and blackberry envy because fido did not offer the service. Then in January, I was so fed up with my crap Moto Razr that I bought an unlocked Blackberry Pearl. Then to my amazement about 2 weeks ago I noticed Fido was all of a sudden offering Blackberry Connect Data plans although they say that they only guarantee it will work with the Nokia E62 that that sell.

I told them it would be absurd for it not to work with a native Blackberry phone and they said to try it but they couldn't guarantee it. So I registered for a data plan, thinking that if it didn't work, so what? I would just cancel it the next day and get charged 1 day out of the month for the plan. No big deal.

I went to their blackberry signup page and entered my phone's IMEI and PIN and email accounts I use and bingo, within 5 minutes, my phone was online and capable of receiving my regular pop emails etc...

Works like a charm although because it is not a Blackberry Enterprise Server they have but rather Blackberry Internet server, my email comes in between 5 and 15 minutes after it is really sent. Better than nothing I guess!

[Perfect Storm]

I'm thinking I'm going to take advantage of this with Rogers. $45 for 2MB (what I pay now) is absurd, but with the $40 for 7MB connect plan I don't fel quite as dirty.

I assume that everything works like normal on the connect plans?

[toemaytoe]

Well I'm thinking that I will have to give it a go. The only thing I would like to find out first is whether or not there are any differences between the (non bes) bb service I have with rogers now and the bb connect service available from fido. Do they both use the same compression technology to keep messages small and save bandwidth and cost? Do they also compress web surfing the same way? Anybody know what the differences if any are?

[tdawg00]

Originally Posted by Perfect Storm

I'm thinking I'm going to take advantage of this with Rogers. $45 for 2MB (what I pay now) is absurd, but with the $40 for 7MB connect plan I don't fel quite as dirty.

I assume that everything works like normal on the connect plans?

That is ridiculous!! I pay 20 for unlimited email and data w/tether and I use around 29 mb a month.... I mean I know its Canadian dollars but geez!!!! Its still 15 dollars more in american dollars.... for 7 mb!

[toemaytoe]

Originally Posted by tdawg00

That is ridiculous!! I pay 20 for unlimited email and data w/tether and I use around 29 mb a month.... I mean I know its Canadian dollars but geez!!!! Its still 15 dollars more in american dollars.... for 7 mb!

You have to understand that the price in Canada is different than in the US. We in Canada don't have an unlimited price plan. The absolute best we have is 200 megs for $100.00 It may be alot but it's not unlimited.

[Perfect Storm]

Originally Posted by tdawg00

That is ridiculous!! I pay 20 for unlimited email and data w/tether and I use around 29 mb a month.... I mean I know its Canadian dollars but geez!!!! Its still 15 dollars more in american dollars.... for 7 mb!

This is what you get with strict regulation and an oligopoly situation

[toemaytoe]

So I signed up today for the fido bb connect. As I expected the fido representative on the phone was very clear in stating that the service is not warranted for any other phone but the one offered but I said I wanted to try it and that the worst that happens is that it doesn't work and I have to cancel my plan. As soon as I put in the fido sim I got messages, I hadn't even activated my pin and imei yet. I know this because I tried to put in my imei and I kept getting a message that the number was already registered. I called fido back and no one at tech support could help me, so I called rogers tech support and that's when I started to get some clear answers. Rogers and fido are almost but not 100% doing the same bb service. The bb connect plan while offered by fido is being handled by rogers. I was told by rogers that my fido bb connect plan is identical to the rogers plan. So, here I am with my unlocked 8700g, my grandfathered city plan at $40.00 per month(!!!) and now my email service. I picked the 25 meg for $40 plan as a place to start but from what I can see I won't be using the entire amount in a month. When I called rogers I asked them if they could give me some idea of the amount of data that I used since I started up a week ago. They told me that I have only used 1 meg. I find that incredible. I thought that I used it quite a bit.
Now I just have to figure out how to use the rest of this thing. I'm going to be hanging around this forum for some time to come I think.

Cheers,

[Jagga]

Originally Posted by toemaytoe

You have to understand that the price in Canada is different than in the US. We in Canada don't have an unlimited price plan. The absolute best we have is 200 megs for $100.00 It may be alot but it's not unlimited.

Well this is because just in 2006 ALONE of all users on Rogers Wireless network only 4% yes just that many, uses wireless data (including ALL packages).

Thats 4% of 6.5million users on Rogers Wireless! 260'000 PPL! OUCH not enough to sustain profits from data alone. This is NOT isolated from common ppl and BES users this includes users owning SE phones and other business' using Mobile Data Modems (like Fido's iFido service - initially started by Innuckshuk Inc) & local Toronto Police Cars using EDGE data to communicate with Police HQ.

Pathetic I know ... but with stratosphere pricing then Rogers will never have a blowout qtr or find short-term return on investment for their limited 3G service.

So you see the viscious circle.

[RedLocz]

You guys have this girl all excited! I've been afraid to unlock my BB 8700g and make this switch.

It sounds like everyone had initially bought their BB's from Rogers. Will this work with a T-Moblie phone?

Should I not hold my breath?

[jlb]

Rogers does plan on eventually having fido offer full blown blackberry service using everything they offer Rogers customers.

Last I had heard they were waiting until they got HSDPA rolled out across the country for Rogers clients and Fido would offer a lower cost solution piggy backing off of rogers systems.

Don't know what phone they are going offer or even a time line for it all. I know they have been working on this for over a year now.

[botrick]

I have just gotten my unlocked Rogers Pearl set up with FIDO. I too was told there was no way it would work but it did only minutes after the call.



I am having a few issues though, and am hoping to get some help:

1. I have installed the desktop software because I want to sync with my agenda, and ever since am receiving e-mails every 10 minutes with the following subject: RIM_bca28a80-e9c0-11d1-87fe-00600811c6a2
and the following e-mail content:
This message is used to carry data between the BlackBerry handheld and an associated server. Please do not delete, move or respond to this message - it will be processed by the server.


I think it may be because the desktop is looking for enterprise server when I am only pushing e-mails to my BB. Not sure how to get these e-mails to stop.

2. My e-mails show up in both the e-mail folder and the MMS folder. Is there a way have each go to their respective folders?

3. I have tried to send pictures I have taken with my BB as e-mails, and have always received the following message:
The service does not support the native attachment
Is this related to my FIDO service or is there something I have not set correctly on my BB?

THANKS for any help!

[dicin]

WOW!!!!!!!!!

I was with FIDO grandfathered with the unlimited anywhere calls in Canada. I needed BB and they told me that BB connect was different then the one with Rogers. I ported my number to Rogers. I wander if I call customer services at Fido they would reinstate. I do have three other lines at Fido however not on that unlimited Canada plan.

[MushMouth]

Has anyone tried to use a Treo with BBC on fido?