RIM Still Investigating Network Failure

By Dave Nixon

Research In Motion has still not identified why its BlackBerry service failed for quite a few hours on Monday.

The company said in a statement on Tuesday “RIM is continuing to investigate the exact cause” of the outage. Late on Monday it issued an apology for any difficulty cause by the incident, resulting in customers devoid of current email for about three hours starting around 3:30 pm Eastern Time, throughout North America.

It was the second main outage in less than a year for the popular mobile data service, on which about 12 million subscribers relied upon at the beginning of last December. The preceding hitch, which occurred last April, was caused by a small software upgrade error, followed by a unsuccessful switchover to a backup system, according to RIM. The company said almost immediately that it had identified “certain aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes that will be enhanced” as a consequence of the failure.

BlackBerry email negotiates a intricate infrastructure linking mobile operator networks, RIM’s network operations centre and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers inside companies that make use of the service. It pushes messages from enterprise email systems, including Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes, out to the popular BlackBerry devices.

The system is increasing in complexity as RIM adds third-party services to appeal to consumers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. As the company attempts to sustain the rapid expansion of its subscribers. Last year’s fiscal third quarter saw a net gain of 1.65 million and these forms of problems are probable, Lin said.

“It’s hard to really expect any major service provider to be 100 percent reliable,” Lin said. Even though enterprises now have more push email choices than they did when the BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, those competitors, such as Visto and Motorola’s Good Technology system, aren’t notably more dependable, he said.

“When it comes to reliable push email it’s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,” Lin said.