Blackberry On A LAN Without

For a number of reasons, I am cutting back on my expenses wherever I can. One of these expenses was my monthly fee for using a private MS Exchange account. After testing out Google’s own BlackBerry options over my mobile wireless service, I found that even though I am missing out on tasks with Google’s sync solution, I could not be happier. The service has worked perfectly without fail for well over a month now. This means I can out my Exchange account to bed and feel good about it.

But this brings me to the second part of my own personal “stimulus” plan. I want to kill off my mobile Internet service… no matter how much it hurts. Yeah, the very idea seems rather radical for someone who practically sleeps with his BlackBerry in his hands, but I think I am willing to give it a go. Now for the part I am not having a lot of luck with — getting my BlackBerry to play ball with the local Wi-Fi network.

Here at the house, we use FiOS high speed Internet from Verizon which gives us WPA2/Personal wireless access. And to be honest, I cannot see any reason why I would not be able to connect my BlackBerry up with the home Wi-Fi network, it’s pretty straightforward. Where I am running into some issues, however, is getting the BlackBerry to understand that for testing, I need it to connect all data services over the 802.11g network, not At&T’s Edge network. I have tried a number of settings with my BlackBerry 8820, but everything still seems to send out all data over the Edge network regardless of what changes I make.

Here is what I am asking of you. I need to know if it is even possible to set the BlackBerry to utilize a local Wi-Fi network instead of AT&T’s Edge network for data services. Not speaking SMS, rather my email and Google Sync settings. If you can lend me some thoughts on this, please comment back to this article so that I might be able to dive into this deeper — thanks everyone.