RANT! Why Can’t RIM Let Us Delete Our BIS Account?

For years I have had one big issue when I try to sell, buy, donate, or give away a used BlackBerry when I switch carriers. If a person has not updated the BlackBerry associated with their BIS account to a new PIN then your BlackBerry will remain associated to that account and you will have to jump through 100 hoops to get it un-associated. Until then you will keep on getting an error along the lines of  “This device registered with another service provider…” My friend just ran into this issue and he couldn’t believe it when I told him why it was happening.

Let me give you a scenario where this happens:

You purchased a BlackBerry 9000 from AT&T a few years back and then decide to switch to T-Mobile. If you don’t call up AT&T and sit on the phone with them for over an hour to delete your BIS account then your BlackBerry will remain tied to AT&T’s BIS. This will make it impossible to now associate the BlackBerry with T-Mobile’s BIS. Or better yet say you buy a used BlackBerry 9100 from someone in Australia you would be in a world of pain trying to get that BlackBerry disassociated.

Way back when it used to be that you could just login to your old BIS account and just enter in zeros for the PIN and IMEI and it would disassociate the device but that no longer works. As far as I know RIM customer support are currently the only ones that can disassociate a device from a carriers BIS. You would have to call that carrier and drive them nuts until they decide to escalate the issue to RIM to have your device disassociated. I have done this 3 times already and every time it took over an hour.

RIM even admits that you will have to call you carrier to get the device disassociated in the instructions of what to do when you want to sell a BlackBerry. In their words:

If the BlackBerry smartphone was previously associated with a BlackBerry Internet Service account, contact the wireless service provider to remove the association between the BlackBerry Internet Service account and the BlackBerry smartphone.

Would it kill RIM to just add a “Clear association” or better yet a “Delete my BIS account” button?