Cornered!
Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.

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Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow The black art of Blackberry
The black art of Blackberry PDF E-mail
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by Stuart Corner   
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
Blackberry users across several networks in North America lost service this week, one again highlighting the obscurity with which Research in Motion clouds the inner workings of a service on which so many depend.
Reporting on the incident, InfoWorld said: "BlackBerry users may not be able to send or receive messages, browse the Internet, or use the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site, according to a message from RIM that some users posted [on a message board]. In addition, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers may not be able to connect to RIM's infrastructure, and carriers and resellers may not be able to create accounts or provision services, the notice said. The outage happened because 'a component of the network infrastructure is experiencing a service interruption'."

Now there's the rub! Exactly what network component was this? And why was there no redundancy, given the huge number of users who depend on the service, often for quite critical and time sensitive business information?

RIM I am sure gave no explanation, because the organisation is amazingly secretive about how exactly its service operates, as I found out a couple of years ago when Blackberry customers in Australia suffered a similar outage.

At the time I observed that "the system works through a BlackBerry enterprise server which sits in a customer's data centre and which routes messages from their email server, (eg Microsoft Exchange) to BlackBerry handhelds [but] You have to dig very deep indeed [into RIM's public information] to get any indication that this routing is via BlackBerry servers located in Canada."

Dig deep I did, and I managed to find some information which referred obliquely to "The BlackBerry Infrastructure" without spelling out what this was or that it meant routing all Blackberry email message via servers in Canada. It put it to RIM that it was being less than candid and received this response from their PR person."

 
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