magiciansampras

Yesterday's outage lasted basically the entire afternoon and evening for me. This morning it seems to be working fine. Very irritating.

DenverBrian

I am so glad I work in an environment where a Blackberry is neither required nor desired. I feel sorry for those who are so convinced that their lives are empty unless they can thumb-type respond to the most banal of messages all day.

I can't think of a message I receive that can't wait for an answer for at least a few minutes; and if it's truly urgent, there's this wonderful technology called the phone call that actually connects people in synchronous conversation. More people should try that sometime.

magiciansampras

Wow that was quite the rant. Congrats!

Dubai Stu

In response to the prior poster, you can get iPhone service in Canada with Bell (their new HSPA network) or Rogers. Telus is supposed to have it as well, but I'm not sure if the phones are in.

My wife and I are both Blackberry BES clients (different companies) and both of our services went down at roughly 7:00pm EST.

jsnydcsa

Though I wouldn't go nearly as far as your sentiments in the first paragraph, I too am glad I don't have one for work (nor a full-time work laptop).

When Blackberries first became the rage, a family member received one through work. They brought it by, set up the cradle, set up the BB and left it with the cradle, etc. in his office. He never picked it up or used it. Battery went dead and that was that. Over the years (dare I say a full decade+), IT would roll out a new model, bring it to him (at some point ditching the cradle for OTA syncing) and he'd leave it to have the battery run out. In 2008, he retired. As part of his exit interview with IT, he dutifully gave back the most current model, dead battery and all, to an IT guy with two BB's, an iPhone and a cell on his waist. He estimates that over the years, he went through about 10-12 models never once so much as picking the thing up. He was old school - e.g. told his secretary he was going to lunch at [restaurant name]. If she needed to reach him for something important, (kids didn't make the cut for non-emergencies), she'd call the restaurant and ask for him or give the staff a message to bring to him. He did this as recently as 2008.

On to the topic at hand.

TMO Blackberry Curve using BIS. I use a university "forwarding" email address which forwards to my TMO BB email address and to a separate home/desktop-based email address. Usually, emails arrive on the BB and the desktop at precisely the same time.
Location (for the last week) - Washington, D.C.-area.
Did NOT notice last week's outage.
This most recent outage has definitely hit me. Several emails have not come through to my BB altogether (while going to my desktop). More commonly, emails to the BB arrive late (6+ hours after arriving on my desktop). I'd say I'm a medium user of email.

You can gauge my rough sentiment toward my person BB based on my first paragraph. Indeed, I like the BB over just a plain old cell phone b/c it holds contacts, notes and calendars I need and doesn't require a phone keypad to type out emails and SMSs. So, it is not a massive problem for me.

elCheapoDeluxe

This last outage was significant. I have not been affected by any of the previous outages since I got my BB in november of 2008, as they were BIS outages and I use BES. This outage, though, seemed to knock out all data access. Not only could I not get my BES email, I couldn't use the web browser, google talk, google mail app (which I use for personal email), google maps, garmin mobile, podcaster, tivo, worldmate, WSJ, or any other of my data reliant apps - even via WiFi. SMS messaging and phone calls were all that worked.

According to RIM, the culprit was a faulty version of blackberry messenger that was released recently. I don't even have blackberry messenger loaded on my device and couldn't care less about it - but if BBM is that closely tied into their infrastructure that it can take the system down then I have serious concerns. This is definitely a liability of the generally more efficient server based RIM model vs the more data intensive distributed model used by Apple, Microsoft, etc. I'm not going to ditch my blackberry for one of those other devices at this point, as I really do far prefer my BB, but if they can get a BB devotee such as myself this pissed off, RIM has a real problem.

DenverBrian

Too close to home?

Steve M

What I don't understand is how a problem at RIM took out not only email, but web browsing capabilities for BB's on multiple carriers. It would seem to be very inefficient to have all BB web browsing go through some central choke point at RIM rather than just go directly from the BB device to the Internet through the carrier's regular data network.

elCheapoDeluxe

This is one of the key reasons why the blackberry impacts carrier networks less and runs up less roaming charges than devices like the iPhone or windows mobile. Data is compressed before it ever travels over the air, and things like images are downsampled to reflect the device resolution.

I'm not sure why each carrier can't host their own seperate BIS though - rather than have them all hosted in Waterloo. Intellectual property concerns?

Jimmie76

Well I'm just grateful that BB don't work like the Sidekick did/does, I'd hate to find everything gone.