BlackBerry Outage Spreads To North America

iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'" This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.

Comments

iPhone reception issues have been addressed

[SuperKendall]

A) the antenna design is a slightly altered on that was introduced with the Verizon iPhone. The antenna design is actually very good, you get much better reception with the larger external antenna - the only downside was the gap you could touch to potentially drop a call (if reception was weak), which has been moved to where you can't hit it accidentally. It's also not like you cannot affect signal strength similarly with almost any phone, search for "HTC death grip" and see what I mean. Your meaty hand does a great job of reducing signal strength when you wrap it around any phone tightly.

B) You can opt for Verizon or Sprint for voice service, which have better call quality - but slower data feeds. With the 4s at least you can still roam in GSM countries even if you have Verizon, which is nice. That stopped me from leaving AT&T before.

The annoying thing though, is that you cannot buy an unlocked iPhone to use with anything but a GSM carrier. I was hoping to buy an unlocked hone and try Sprint for a while... so be aware if you wanted to get an unlocked phone for international travel you'll be using AT&T.

Re:Nothing to see here, we're fine

[pnewhook]

No the RIM network is secure which is why a lot of middle east countries have threatened to ban the BB as they cannot snoop on the messages:

http://www.security-technologynews.com/news/uae-bans-blackberry-services.html

http://darkwap.mobi/technology-stuff/Blackberry-Ban-in-India

Re:Fortunately this will never happen to the iPhon

[sarhjinian]

iPhones and Android phones have both been able to *UNSECURELY* integrate into corporate networks for quite a while

This.

Yes, you can use EAS or IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV to get an iOS, Android or WM/WP device to work, but none of them are anywhere near as secure or manageable as BES. For the consumer or light business user, yes, EAS is fine, and geeks can suffer with IMAP+DAV and it's limitations, but as you increase either the number of users or the security and manageability requirements, they don't scale. Anyone who says otherwise has never actually used BES and has no idea what it does.

That said, as soon as someone duplicates what BES can do on iOS, Android and/or WP, BlackBerry is dead to the enterprise. It'll be Symbian all over again, and RIM will be left selling featurephones to teenagers, third-worlders, and third-world teenagers.

There's some question as to whether or not RIM can even port what BES can do to their next-generation devices. The absence of BES manageability hurt the PlayBook's chances in the enterprise more than anything else about it, and the PlayBook runs that same platform. I get the impression that the infrastructure is old, creaky and not all that well understood by RIM's own people.