berry has HOW many kinds of net?
March 25, 2010 11:00 AM   Subscribe

Ok I am confused about Blackberries, the way they connect to the internet, and wifi.

Bold 9700 on Vodafone. 500 MB internet a month, 5 quid a month blackberry subscription and wifi.

When I am on wifi - i.e. i turn cellular service off in settings - and go to the app store and download some apps, are those apps coming from wifi or from blackberry net? Because I got a blackberry instant message whilst downloading I am concerned now that I downloaded using blackberry net, not my wifi.
posted by By The Grace of God to Technology (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
The easiest way to check would be to turn everything you can off sans wifi. Then see if you can connect.
posted by lakerk at 11:12 AM on March 25, 2010


As long as your phone can resolve a DNS address, it is connecting to Blackberry's services. It most likely got sent via your Wifi connection.

I second what lakerk said.
posted by tmt at 2:03 PM on March 25, 2010


First, there's a setting somewhere for preferring the wifi to everything else.

Next, the blackberry message is probably coming to you over the telco network. Because it's a push service, and your wifi IP might not actually be reachable, they probably engineered it to only use the telco IP.

Finally, blackberry is somewhat broken in using wifi. When the connection is made, the programmer (that'd be me) must *explicitly* choose the wifi network. If the wifi does't work (not connected, not routable, whatever) an error is thrown and the program must request the connection again on the default network.

Most programmers, frankly, don't bother. And so it falls back to the default. In theory that's set by the setting I mentioned above. In practice, the berry's priority is to get you a connection to the specified host. Your preferences in the path that connection takes are rather inconsequential.

All this is a long way of saying that it's difficult to say with certainty what network any particular connection is using.
posted by Netzapper at 3:29 PM on March 25, 2010


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