 on its own network instead of through their roaming agreement with MTN.
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8ta, the South African network operator powered by Telkom, first launched their BlackBerry services through MTN’s network. This means that if you were a BlackBerry subscriber on 8ta you needed to roam on MTN to get connectivity. Last week, 8ta began allowing BlackBerry devices to connect to BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) on its own network instead of through their roaming agreement with MTN.
When asked about the roll-out of BIS on their own network, Vishal Phlad, executive for products and services at 8ta, reiterated their previous statements on their network plans.
“As the network is built out we will start changing the connection order to 8ta network first and then our national roaming partner’s network,” Phlad said. “For BlackBerry subscribers we are doing this in a phased approach.”
Before, BlackBerry devices on the 8ta network displayed the text “MTN – 8.ta” when connected to BIS, indicating that it was roaming on MTN to get a connection.
However, this text changed to simply “8.ta” recently.
Manually switching the device to connect to MTN still worked at the time of publication, which indicated that it will still be possible for 8ta BlackBerry users to roam on MTN if they go outside of 8ta’s coverage.