TechTips - BlackBerry "This is a Wi-Fi Service" Error

I love my BlackBerry (8350i to name the exact model) but recently I started having trouble using a lot of the services (web browsing, Facebook, and twitter) on the phone and was getting one particularly annoying error message:

"This is a Wi-Fi service. Please ensure your device has an active Wi-Fi connection and try again"

It took me a good 20 minutes to find out how to fix this error. In this article I will explain how to fix the error, why you are getting it, and how to avoid it in the future.

My first thoughts were that the phone needed updating, there was an Operating system update offered from Nextel for the phone so I went ahead and downloaded and installed it, hoping this would solve the problem. It didn't solve the problem but it actually did give me some other features that were a nice surprise, so it didn't solve my error but it was worth the update.

Second thing I did was start checking the options and settings for the phone, it took me forever to find what I was looking for (Since I had no idea what I was looking for), but after looking through almost every option to every program I found what I was looking for in the web browser settings. There is a setting that makes your BlackBerry only allow the internet\web browsing when you are connected to a Wi-Fi service, and this is what was causing my error. This was also causing my Facebook application to not allow me to update my status or upload mobile pictures!

So to change the setting to allow your BlackBerry to use the data network do the following:

Click the BlackBerry Button

Click Options

Click Advanced Options

Click Browser

Click Default Browser Configuration Dropdown (probably set to Hotspot Browser)

Click Internet Browser

Close all windows

Test the connection to the Internet

Now test the phone, you shouldn't get the error "This is a Wi-Fi service. Please ensure your device has an active Wi-Fi connection and try again"

So what caused this problem? Now that was a little harder to find out, I had to talk to a Sprint representative for that, they told me my phone was low on memory (256MB built in to run the OS) so the phone switches this option to save resources! Sounds like terrible programming to me, but this is what the phone does to save RAM when it gets low on resources. So to avoid this error in the future I was told to clean old emails, Facebook alerts, phone calls, basically everything on my phone, that is all stored in the internal memory of the phone(instead of on the MicroSD Card)

I asked if I could move the data to my MicroSD card and he said not for the model of phone I had. So I was a little mad about that but I did fix the "This is a Wi-Fi service. Please ensure your device has an active Wi-Fi connection and try again" error. I hope this guide helps you to get rid of the error and gain internet access back.