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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.
What did one Blackberry owner say to the other?
Nothing!
Summation 2
And nothing of value was lost.
Also, BB owners shoulda thought of that before buying a phone with a centralized web proxy and messaging!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
they pull a major fat rabbit out of their ass
Blackberry has some weird apps for their phones...
In the UK, on both outages, RIM has let the mobile networks take full blame for all of the issues - they haven't issued a statement, or let the networks know what to tell customers, with network call centers as much in the dark as the callers themselves.
No B infrastructure?
No testing?
Bet the business made lots of money though.
Deleted
"The power of the force has stopped you, you hosers."
Ehh, apparently you missed a memo or five. iPhones and Android phones have both been able to integrate into corporate networks for quite a while. I have full e-mail, calendaring, and contact sync from the corporate exchange server on my iPhone. We're talking a Fortune 100 multinational here, not "dude the e-mail server guy totally hooked me up with e-mail on my iPhone!" On top of that I can use the VPN server to direct connect to the corporate network and manage my systems from the wifi in the mall if there's an emergency. Maybe a Blackberry can do that too, I don't know, but there's nothing I need to do remotely that I can't do from my phone. I also happen to know for a fact that this is all true for Android too (the guy I replaced uses a Droid something or other and he had the same setup I do). The days when Blackberry could just say "yeah, but we have all the business clients" are long over. They need to compete on features, because business no longer goes to them by default.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also, BB owners shoulda thought of that before buying a phone with a centralized web proxy and messaging!
And Apple / Android owners should have thought about the ability of the government/whoever to eavesdrop on their phone / text messaging before they bought their devices. I choose personal security over an outage every two years any day.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
http://www.security-technologynews.com/news/uae-bans-blackberry-services.html
http://darkwap.mobi/technology-stuff/Blackberry-Ban-in-India
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Since this outage started, the Battery life on my Blackberry Bold has been depressingly short. Today it was flat after just 4 hours...I hope the device isn't repeatedly going out to RIM servers and running up a crazy data bill (with nothing to show for it). That's the only reason I can think that the battery life would coincidentally drop radically...or...the battery simply failed at the same time as the outage. - COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
Its acceptable and funny to make fun of Canadians, because it makes no sense. You've got a pretty decent economy, health care system, education system, great beer, doughnuts, ect. Its an ironic insult, that is really an insult at one's own nationality. Plus, everyone knows that the best comedians are Canadian, and they've given us a lot of material to work with.
So you'll just have to live with being praised with humour, or you'll have to move to the states.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Not exactly. Blackberry operates a parallel e-mail system, meaning the typical user has corporate e-mail service via Exchange, with BES connecting Exchange to the world of Blackberry e-mail. An earthquake is a natural event that is addressed in disaster recovery planning. The earth shook, things broke, we get it. When BB has an outage (for whatever reason), people start to wonder why we need the redundant layer of BB service in the first place. Corporate e-mail (e.g. Exchange) is viewed as a necessity, while BES is optional. It is certainly possible to get a smart phone to process e-mail without BES.
I guess it all boils down to how reliable your core e-mail service is. In the companies where I have experience with Exchange coexisting with BES, BES was a nuisance but it almost always worked. We had a lot of downtime with Exchange, so for the most part we appreciated having our Blackberrys work when Exchange didn't. Better admins or a better e-mail server might have made us reconsider the value of BES, since it was an additional point of failure. But in our case it helped more than it hurt.
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.
--srj/mmv
IMHO blackberries are still superior devices when looked at through the myopic view of being a for-work device. However.. as a "personal" device that occasionally gets used for work I'd prefer an iPhone/Android over a blackberry.
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