some countries allow the use of blackberries on pay and go plans (prepay). thats one alternative

if your lucky to have a blackberry that has wifi e.g a blackberry bold 9000( my fave) and your also lucky enough to have a wireless router at home, you should be able to connect your blackberry to your wireless router at home and use it providing you have the correct passwords/wep keys.

hope thats helpful.

You could use WiFi to get acces to browser, windows live messenger, blackberry messenger and other downloaded programs like twitter, facebook etc. But talk to your carrier about that because it doesn’t precisely work in all countries.

Good luck.