Blackberry Email Service Outage For Western Hemisphere

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266685,00.html">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266685,00.html</a><br /><br /><i>"Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM) said Wednesday that BlackBerry service had been restored to most users of the popular wireless e-mail device after an overnight service interruption hit customers across North America. The company said in a statement that it's reviewing the root cause of the disruption, which began Tuesday night, and is "closely monitoring systems to maintain normal service levels". It gave no details on what caused the outage."</i><br /><br />Wow. I guess I had no idea every blackberry user was going through RIM's service. I assumed those that purchased the service from the carriers may, but I just assumed corporations that purchased the Blackberry Enterprise Server bypassed all of that. So, is this correct?<br /><br />Blackberry: Corporate Email Server->Blackberry Enterprise Server->Internet->RIM Centralized Server->Carrier->Device<br />Windows Mobile: Corporate Email (Exchange) Server->Internet->Carrier (optional)->Device<br /><br />Which model makes more sense? :wink:

[Philip Colmer]

Thanks, RIM, for giving us another reason for migrating to Windows Mobile. It just gets easier and easier to justify the migration.

--Philip

[JvanEkris]

This is actually one of the reasons many governments want to ban their civil servants from using the BlackBerry. There are only 5 NOC's on the globe, 2 being in Canada and 1 in the UK. Inmagine all your heavily classified e-mail going through a NOC that is in the UK, which by definition may be eaves-dropped by both the UK and US....

Jaap

[that_kid]

Yeah I really hate the fact that you have to have a BB server then funnel all your data to the BB headend.

[farnold]

I don't get why still so many vendors get away with their "it has to be all mine" approach. Sony with their never-ending attempts to "invent" new formats that are not used by anyone else. Apple with their hardward that can only be developed by them. Google with stroing whatever you do with them for the rest of your life. But everyone thorwing dirt at Microsoft because they are so strong - ever thought that it may be because they are more open than any of the ones mentioned before?

[Mr. PPC]

The US Government has it's own NOC for the very reason others have mentioned.

[Jason Lee]

HAHAHAHAA.. *cough*
Sorry.

silly BB people. ;)

[jimfee]

This system was at one point owned by Ericsson, and subsequently SBC, and marketed at one point under the product name MobiWan, and it supported most early BB devices, then the carriers caught on. :(

[Paul Mah]

I posted a short article about the "downtime", if its not too much of the same news already. But I do go a bit in deeper to describe how the BlackBerry works. You can ready more about it on my personal Blog: "BlackBerry Suffers Widespread Outage (http://www.techatplay.com/2007/04/19/blackberry-suffers-widespread-outage/).

Most of you would have read a zillion articles by now about how RIM had to "go slow" so that the NOC will not be overwhelmed by the back-log of data? Well you see, the BlackBerry operates on a store-and-forward mechanism through the NOC. However, because all traffic packets is encrypted, RIM is unable to distinguish between the traffic and hence cannot just "discard" ANY packets at all without the potential of "losing" your e-mails.

I don't know if there are mechanism built into the BES to prevent this: but extrapolate this thinking a little bit further to the point where an NOC outage stretches beyond the NOC's storing/caching ability....

Direct Push is the best eh? :)

Regards,
Paul Mah.

[GadgetDave]

Ah, some folks just don't get it.

Yes, I mean the pocket PC in this case.

I continue to point out that (even as a PPC user and lover), that the Blackberry solution just works. This is RIM's first significant outage in about 7 years - tell me that your exchange environment is that reliable. :) Remember that this infrastructure did originally use the 9600k Mobitex network to push email before the PPC existed ...

Yes, everything does go through the BB NOC - 3DES encrypted, BTW - and that means that there's no holes in the firewall and no infrastructure for companies to maintain. Since you own the BES and it makes an OUTBOUND connection to RIM to push the email, you don't have a bunch of support costs, and it's as simple for 1 client as for 10,000.

And in the end, it just works. Find me your average upper-middle manager to CxO type and let me give them a 'berry and a Pocket PC, and they'll be more productive with the blackberry in 5 minutes than they will with the PPC in an hour. Sure, the PPC is probably more "expandable" today, but there is a wealth of blackbery software out there, as well.

There's a reason they're called "crackberries" -- and I still rarely hear even my hard-core PPC friends sound as addicted as the blackberry users I know. I know if I had to choose one it would still be the 'berry today.

:)

[Paul Mah]

One thing about the BlackBerry is that it definitely falls into the "just works" category in terms of total ease of setup and usage. And of course, marketing-wise, it commands a kind of almost fanatical loyalty, which of course is not a bad thing from a marketing point of view.

However, I feel that this leads to an unbalanced view point in terms of actual technical merits. Now, I am not saying that the BB is no good, just that we need to evaluate it purely on its merits in comparison to improvements made by competing push mail systems.

Give you an example of something which I've read at least a few times these 2 days about the BB; one of whom is a respected analyst no less. It goes something along the line of: "Well, even though the BB was down, I'm sure some of your corporate mail systems suffer more down time right". What this statement ignores is that for most BB users, the BlackBerry IS your corporate E-mail AND the BB network combined. Hence if your corporate e-mail up-time sucks, then your BB definitely sucks, and sucks more too!

Of course, the BlackBerry's architecture has certain merits too, one of which is that there is no need to poke additional holes in the firewall. In this regard, I personally feel that this advantage is mitigated by changing technical and operational realities. Assuming a Microsoft Exchange/Direct Push setup, the same firewall configuration that supports your users' SSL web-mail is also used by Direct Push.

And of course, some of Direct Push's advantages like the ability to access ALL your folders in Exchange simply blows the BB out of the water. I wrote an article on that a while back, its a bit dated already, but would probably be interesting to anyone who wants to do a technical comparison. [
How is Microsoft's Direct Push better than the BlackBerry (http://www.techatplay.com/2006/10/20/how-is-microsofts-direct-push-better-than-the-blackberry/)]

Regards,
Paul Mah.
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[Philip Colmer]

I know that there are a couple of smileys in your post, Dave, but I'm not entirely sure whether or not you are being serious. Apologies if I've had a humour failure here ... :D

I continue to point out that (even as a PPC user and lover), that the Blackberry solution just works. This is RIM's first significant outage in about 7 years - tell me that your exchange environment is that reliable. :)
Well, our experience in the UK wasn't affected by this particular outage, but it was affected by the incompetence of the staff at Vodafone. Every time they change the tariffs on their billing platform, the flag that said "this user is on the RIM network" got dropped and all of the BBs stopped working. It took a threat to cancel the contract to ensure they stopped doing that. Our Exchange 2003 installation has been 100% rock solid since we installed it. Admittedly, Exchange 5.5 wasn't that good.

Yes, everything does go through the BB NOC - 3DES encrypted, BTW - and that means that there's no holes in the firewall and no infrastructure for companies to maintain. Since you own the BES and it makes an OUTBOUND connection to RIM to push the email, you don't have a bunch of support costs, and it's as simple for 1 client as for 10,000.
Wrong on two counts. You need a hole in the firewall for the outbound connection and you need to maintain the BES server so you've got infrastructure there. The BES server needs licences so you've got additional cost there plus the cost of upgrading the software on the server.

By comparison, Exchange 2003 onwards comes with everything you need to support Direct Push to WM devices. Yes, you need an inbound HTTPS connection but companies that are deploying this sort of solution are likely to have HTTPS for OWA and for RPC over HTTPS as well, so the hole is already there.

For me, I think that WM6 coupled with Exchange 2007 is going to be a stellar combination. Microsoft have put a lot of effort into expanding the mobile capabilities and the level of interaction that you now have with Exchange is fantastic.

--Philip

[JvanEkris]

Yes, everything does go through the BB NOC - 3DES encrypted, BTW - and that means that there's no holes in the firewall and no infrastructure for companies to maintain. Since you own the BES and it makes an OUTBOUND connection to RIM to push the email, you don't have a bunch of support costs, and it's as simple for 1 client as for 10,000.Please keep in mind that for every BB user a read/write permission has to be allowed on the exchange server for the general BES-user. So when a BES gets hacked, you gain access to all these users accounts. BBProxy proved, as a concept, that hacking the BES from a BB was possible and it would give you huge rights in the corporate network. Other vulnerabilities, like the GIF rendering problem (originating from Windows OS, but could be abused) leave the server exposed as well...

Jaap