In case you haven’t heard, the Indian government said that they would put a ban on BlackBerrys (BlackBerry data that is) if Research in Motion didn’t provide Indian based telecoms that support the BlackBerry a means to monitor traffic being sent and received on RIM’s secure BlackBerry network. BlackBerry data is encrypted which prevents India’s Union Home Ministry from monitoring messages sent on the devices.
Research in Motion is, however, expected to provide a solution early next week, that will ease the concerns and meet the 15 day deadline set by the Indian government back in March.
“BlackBerry is cooperating and they are saying they will come up with a solution to the issue any day now”, said T.V. Ramachandran, director general of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI). “I am hopeful of seeing a solution even before 9th, I mean some time early next week.”
India currently only has about 400,000 BlackBerry users, however, the country is one of the fastest growing emerging markets and the BlackBerry is poised to do very well there so long as RIM can address the governments security concerns.
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We’re not quite sure what took them so long, however, Research in Motion has launched the official BlackBerry Support Community Forums.
The forum looks like it was just started today as I cannot find any posts dated before April 1st. I do have to apologize because I cannot remember where I first heard about this. It may have been an email from a reader or the BlackBerry Connection Newsletter.
So far the BlackBerry Support Community Forums appear to be a hit. There are over 100 registered users and over 500 guest logged in as I write this post. There are already several dozen threads and a couple of hundred posts.
Since these forums are run by Research in Motion, I wonder if they will control the amount of leaked information that you can find on the threads. I was not able to use the name RIMarkable as my logon name when I created my account. I find that kind of interesting.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when we talked about how India may ban the BlackBerry, then followed up a few days later and said the the ban appeared to be off? Well, the Indian ban on BlackBerrys is definitely not going to happen, however, BlackBerry email may still be if deadlines for RIM to give the Indian government algorithms needed to decrypt messages aren’t met..
Telecom companies supporting the BlackBerry have been give 15 days to enable monitoring of the content transmitted on BlackBerrys or they will be ordered to stop the service. There are about 400,000 BlackBerry users in India and the will no longer be able to send or receive email or PIN messages from their devices if the deadlines aren’t met.
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Remember the scheduled BlackBerry outage that Research in Motion was supposed to be having this passed Saturday morning? Well, thanks to “outstanding cooperation” on the part of RIM with Missouri’s emergency response community, the planned BlackBerry outage for database upgrades was postponed.
The request for not taking down BlackBerry service early Saturday morning didn’t come in from Homeland Security until late Friday afternoon. By RIM keeping the BlackBerry network up and running, emergency workers were able to communicate without missing a beat.
I know that I’ve said RIM didn’t have a clue as to how disruptive BlackBerry outages are. In this particular case, they clearly did, and, I applaud them.
Remember the other day when we said that India banned the BlackBerry? Well, Telecoms Secretary, Siddhartha Behura, told reporters at an industry conference that “There is no question of banning at this point.”
The department of telecoms will meet with the representatives of the four wireless providers that currently offer BlackBerry service in India.
“We are not interested that we say BlackBerry will not be used in this country”, said Behura. ”
We want operators to talk to BlackBerry people and put pressure on them to provide the necessary and satisfactory answers to security agencies. That is why we are talking to them.”
I guess it kind of sucks if you are Indian telecom Tata Teleservices. They were the company that had their application to offer BlackBerry service rejected, however, they weren’t invited to the meeting.
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A few of us have been trying to get our heads round some of the new updates to BES 4.1 SP5 this week. While we have covered the unknown territory that is HTML email, one of the other highly anticipated updates has been OTASL (Over The Air Software Loading).
For those that don’t know, this is the devices ability to receive firmware updates remotely rather than an IT department having to collect users devices to perform the upgrades centrally (as currently happens). According to RIM’s documentation you need to have Service Pack 5 on your BES and you need the latest 4.3/4.5 device firmware. What’s odd is that there’s nowhere on the BES to configure OTASL, leaving us wondering if this is purely an update which happens between the device and RIM’s own servers. Not ideal (unless you’re a BIS user) as this takes ownership away from the IT department, but it is early days and perhaps they’ll be a separate ‘device management’ console (as used to be in BES 4.0) to install which will deal with this. In the meantime, have a guess!
According to a ChangeWave Research survey, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry accounts for almost 3 of 4 smartphone purchases in the enterprise with 73% of the market. The survey also has the BlackBerry poised to pick up another 4 to 5 points.
Although the BlackBerry is, pretty much, crushing everyone, Apple’s iPhone is coming on strong. The iPhone currently has 5% of the enterprise market but ChangeWave predicts that it will pick up at least an additional 6% and could jump all the way to second place behind RIM if second place Palm at 18% and third place Motorola at 9% continue to free fall.
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(sarcasm)We know that last company that you would ever expect to be involved in a patent infringement lawsuit would be Research in Motion(/sarcasm), however, that is exactly what the BlackBerry maker is wrapped up in with Motorola.
Motorola is claiming that the way most BlackBerry 8xxx series devices store contact info in wireless emails and the ability to recognize incoming phone numbers infringes on their patents.
In a clever legal move often referred to as the “Whatever you can do we can also do“, RIM has filed their own claim against Motorola stating that the thumb keyboard is awfully similar to those found on BlackBerrys.
Word on the street is that a “routine” system upgrade is what caused most BlackBerry users to go without BlackBerry service Monday afternoon. I don’t know that I would call an upgrade that could cause most of North, Central, and South America not to be able to send and receive email routine, however, at least we have one more thing to check of the list of things Research in Motion will promise will never happen again when it comes to BlackBerry outages.