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RIM May Compensate Carriers For Outage
Was Outage Final Nail in Blackberry Coffin?
Already facing growing erosion of their remaining (largely enterprise) business to iOS and Android, RIM last week suffered from one of their worst outages ever at the worst time possible. RIM's now in the process of trying to rebuild trust after the multi-continent outage, and is telling the press they'll be reimbursing carriers financially, in addition to one month of free technical support to companies and one month of free online applications. While RIM makes this sound proactive, many global carriers directly reimbursed customers and some last week were considering giving RIM the final bill:
quote:
Some wireless providers in Europe reportedly were considering seeking compensation from RIM for the outages. Those companies might give refunds to angry customers, many of whom were without e-mail, instant messaging and other BlackBerry services for more than three days. Many customers have been furious, and some vowed to ditch their BlackBerrys for competing devices.
Many believe RIM is already largely dead in the water, the company holding tight to enterprise customers as their market share continues to shrink. With those customers questioning RIM's network reliability, it's going to take more than a few freebies to undo the damage already caused by their failure to match Android and Apple with compelling products. As for Blackberry owners, RIM says they'll get free access to online applications and games "with a face value of up to $100."
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neufuse
join:2006-12-06
James Creek, PA

neufuse

Member

centralized servers

why do we even need centralized servers anymore? everyone else gets away without them..... email can run over activesync, pop3, imap perfectly fine...... web works fine over HTTP now that bandwidth to cell phones is much greater then when blackberry started out
patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY

patcat88

Member

Re: centralized servers

so the govt can spy on you
Hooper
Premium Member
join:2001-10-22
Castle Rock, CO

Hooper to neufuse

Premium Member

to neufuse
Because nobody else uses core swtiches on the internet these days....

Cheese
Premium Member
join:2003-10-26
Naples, FL

Cheese

Premium Member

Umm....

How about compensating the CUSTOMERS, they are what MAKES your company. Free apps for a 4 day outage? Ridiculous!
Warez_Zealot
join:2006-04-19
Vancouver

Warez_Zealot

Member

Re: Umm....

said by Cheese:

How about compensating the CUSTOMERS, they are what MAKES your company. Free apps for a 4 day outage? Ridiculous!

I believe it was a $100 credit for apps.... not to bad if you ask me!!

The fact remains that at the end of the day, RIM still has a really good, secure service that no one else offers.

Maybe regular customers can easily go to different smart phone manufacturers; but corporate customers should have had a backup system in case this happened. You seriously can't do business with no backup plan should your only carrier go down...

This is just a media firestorms that will quickly blow over in a couple of days.

I doubt that people will seriously go out and spend money to break their contract, or renew their contract for another 2-3years just to get a diffrent subsidized smart phone. Just not practical for a 4 day outage that has never happened before and for a service that is for the most part pretty reliable..

Cheese
Premium Member
join:2003-10-26
Naples, FL

Cheese

Premium Member

Re: Umm....

I never saw anything to indicate it was 100 dollars for apps.
Os
join:2011-01-26
US

Os to Warez_Zealot

Member

to Warez_Zealot
But if you were on contract up for renewal as I was with a Blackberry that was out from Tuesday until Monday (and may still be out), you're as good as gone.

Nice gestures, RIM. But apps aren't worth anything if you can't download them. Figure out your mess for someone else, I'll be playing with my new Android instead.
amungus
Premium Member
join:2004-11-26
America

amungus

Premium Member

only one course...

They need to ditch their central servers, period...

Sure, BES is neat, but why does everything STILL have to go through their datacenters???

If the recent outage proved anything, it's that this turns out to be a bad idea.

I'm fine with keeping BES for the dwindling users (we're down to around 33 out of 75 available licenses...), but there's got to be a better way than forcing everything to run through their datacenters.

Heck, our CEO just gave up on his Blackberry, and he's had one for AGES.

Oh, and we didn't renew our support contract for BES. Oops. Glad we didn't give them any more money right before grabbing version 5.
Hooper
Premium Member
join:2001-10-22
Castle Rock, CO

Hooper

Premium Member

Re: only one course...

Yeah your exchange server isn't centralized at all. It will never go down. Neither will your ISP....
Warez_Zealot
join:2006-04-19
Vancouver

Warez_Zealot to amungus

Member

to amungus
said by amungus:

They need to ditch their central servers, period...

Sure, BES is neat, but why does everything STILL have to go through their datacenters???

If the recent outage proved anything, it's that this turns out to be a bad idea.

How long was Amazon's decentralized cloud service down again? I'm sure if you compare RIM's "centralized" system to cloud based services, the downtime is negligible??

»www.huffingtonpost.com/2 ··· 375.html
supergeeky
join:2003-05-09
United State

supergeeky

Member

old tech gets left in the dust

you know, sometimes things just need to die...
were not using 8-track or cassette tape anymore, why should we be using RIM?

funny thing is while all this is happening and people are finally "waking up" to the single point of failure issues, others are still putting more of their business "in the cloud" - where exactly the same thing will happen :-(
Hooper
Premium Member
join:2001-10-22
Castle Rock, CO

Hooper

Premium Member

Re: old tech gets left in the dust

said by supergeeky:

funny thing is while all this is happening and people are finally "waking up" to the single point of failure issues, others are still putting more of their business "in the cloud" - where exactly the same thing will happen :-(

Thank you. Seems you were the only person able to grasp this concept.

BTW if your BlackBerry was on wifi during the outage it worked fine. As that is a seperate entry point to their NOC from the carriers....

fifty nine
join:2002-09-25
Sussex, NJ

fifty nine

Member

Re: old tech gets left in the dust

said by Hooper:

said by supergeeky:

funny thing is while all this is happening and people are finally "waking up" to the single point of failure issues, others are still putting more of their business "in the cloud" - where exactly the same thing will happen :-(

Thank you. Seems you were the only person able to grasp this concept.

BTW if your BlackBerry was on wifi during the outage it worked fine. As that is a seperate entry point to their NOC from the carriers....

Not true. My blackberry on wifi was not working until the service was restored.
supergeeky
join:2003-05-09
United State

supergeeky

Member

Re: old tech gets left in the dust

I believe YMMV based on an admin controlled setting in BES to force WiFi to go through the corporate channel/block list/filtering/single point of failure - or to allow it to use the WiFi's default gateway and strait onto the Internet

skuv
@rr.com

skuv to supergeeky

Anon

to supergeeky
So you think companies can run their own servers better in one data center (or one little closet) than a larger company that builds multiple data centers and has "the cloud" redundantly located all over the country or world?
Hooper
Premium Member
join:2001-10-22
Castle Rock, CO

Hooper

Premium Member

More irresponsible "journalism"

Karl,
Read all your "source" links and none of them confirm what you are saying here.

Nowhere has RIM ever said publicly that they will be reimbursing carriers. Nowhere.

Something will likely happen, but you sure as hell won't hear about it. This is a complex situation involving many parties and vendors. There are likely SLA's on both sides. And don't think for a minute RIM won't indemnify any and all hardware vendors for their failures.

Rim
@rr.com

Rim

Anon

Re: More irresponsible "journalism"

And what if it was RIM software that was the cause?

Either way, it just proves RIM's model of needing to be in the middle is pointless