[louzer]

My daughter is in Washington, DC for the summer. They had some pretty bad thunder storms on Friday which took many towers offline. There are people who've been without cell service since Friday and there's still no ETA on service coming back up. The outage has affected some mid-atlantic states as well as some in the midwest.

While Washington is reeling with service outages across carriers, I've been able to BBM my daughter and keep her up to speed with updates I'm getting from Sprint. She had been begging for an iPhone for quite a while, but with her iPhone friends completely out of service, she finally admitted that she's grateful for her BB. I can't remember her saying that since I switched her over to a BB back in '08.

BBM is a huge advantage for RIM and if they can implement it for BB10 such that it is still capable in situations like this, then they need to market it as such.

BBM FTW!!!

[njblackberry]

So BBM works without the towers! Really? That's great news.

Maybe on Sprint. But on GSM carriers you need a data connection (EDGE, 3G, 4G) in order for BBM to work. If you have a data connection for BBM you have e-mail.

When I read about this in a newspaper I will believe it.

[gxgs]

So BBM works without the towers! Really? That's great news.

Maybe on Sprint. But on GSM carriers you need a data connection (EDGE, 3G, 4G) in order for BBM to work. If you have a data connection for BBM you have e-mail.

When I read about this in a newspaper I will believe it.

Yup, satellites, haven't you heard.

This has nothing to do with the BIS service. It has more to do with which carriers were affected. BIS needs the carrier network to tunnel to the NOCs, without it, its nothing, it just so happened that sprint wasn't down, therefore, you should thank sprint, not RIM.

[louzer]

So BBM works without the towers! Really? That's great news.

Maybe on Sprint. But on GSM carriers you need a data connection (EDGE, 3G, 4G) in order for BBM to work. If you have a data connection for BBM you have e-mail.

When I read about this in a newspaper I will believe it.

I never said that. I said that on Friday, there were many towers taken offline. They're slowly coming back and BBM has been available where other services were not. And this is not the first case of a situation like this. Just the most recent.

[louzer]

Yup, satellites, haven't you heard.

This has nothing to do with the BIS service. It has more to do with which carriers were affected. BIS needs the carrier network to tunnel to the NOCs, without it, its nothing, it just so happened that sprint wasn't down, therefore, you should thank sprint, not RIM.

Just got off the phone with Sprint calling me back to follow up. Phone, SMS, non-BIS data, and WiMax were down. She confirmed for me that in the affected area, until other services come back up, BBM was the only part of their network showing activity.

[njblackberry]

Magic. Great job by Sprint. Phone down but BBM up.
Amazing.

[louzer]

Magic. Great job by Sprint. Phone down but BBM up.
Amazing.

It is amazing but I wouldn't call it magic (unless I was trying to be sarcastic). No calls went through. No text messages. No emails. But I was certainly surprised when the BBM check turned to 'D' then 'R'. And then I received a reply acknowledging that BBM was all that was working.

[MobileMadness002]

So BBM works without the towers! Really? That's great news.

Maybe on Sprint. But on GSM carriers you need a data connection (EDGE, 3G, 4G) in order for BBM to work. If you have a data connection for BBM you have e-mail.

When I read about this in a newspaper I will believe it.

Or WiFI. Enough said..........

[qbnkelt]

Or WiFI. Enough said..........

Really?....with electricity down how do you connect to wifi?

I experienced the sane thing as the OP. Over the weekend and during last summer eith the DC quake.

Inform yourselves before jumping the gun.

[MobileMadness002]

Gonna rephrase this...

I did not interpret towers being down to electrical outages as well. This is the original comment.


And you interpreted towers being down to being without all services, very astute.

[qbnkelt]

And you interpreted towers being down to being without all services, very astute.

Interpret???

I interpreted nothing. I experienced plenty.

On Friday night a horrendous clap of thunder shook my house. I was upstairs in the bedroom, reading. Came down the stairs and tried to calm everybody down but grabbed my iPhone, my Skyrocket and my BB. As the storm intensified the lights went out. I took everyone into the basement with me.

In the basement, because iOS has soooooooooooooo many apps, I tried to find noaa and the phone would not connect. I reverted to my BB and BBMd family members outside the U.S. to tell them that if they heard anything to know that we were fine. Also BBMd friends in the US. I continued to attempt to use the iPhone to contact friends and family via iMessage. Could not get through. After several tries I noticed the battery was down to 90% with only 45 minutes lapsed. I turned off the iPhone. So yes, my BBM worked flawlessly throughout the event with no wifi. Verizon and Sprint towers were down all over city and around the mid Atlantic. I am on AT&T and my BB worked flawlessly. Check the news. It's documented.

Last year there was an earthquake in DC. I was downtown. As we evacuated the building I BBMd loved ones in the UK and here to let them know I was fine. All around me, people with iPhones and Androids could not get through. It was only after they started using BBM with their contacts that they got word out of their safety. Check the news, it's documented.

In Haiti the only phones that were working were BBs through BBM. Check the news, it's documented.

Before you attempt to discount real life events from people who lived through them, inform yourself. I haven't got the inclination to educate you on the fine points of BBM and how it works.

[dictoresno]

well, imessage and BBM can be used without cellular service. the iphone and blackberry dont need to be actively connected to a cell tower in order to transmit data over their respective messaging applications. case in point, i can imessage from my ipod or ipad when im on wifi, or email anyone as well. same thing with BBM. i was able to BBM people when the tower on the island i was on was down. no texts or calls. but since i was on wifi, data worked.

the OP's daughter must have been on wifi at the time. which is well known to allow BBM to work independently from the cell tower when its unavailable.

[qbnkelt]

well, imessage and BBM can be used without cellular service. the iphone and blackberry dont need to be actively connected to a cell tower in order to transmit data over their respective messaging applications. case in point, i can imessage from my ipod or ipad when im on wifi, or email anyone as well. same thing with BBM. i was able to BBM people when the tower on the island i was on was down. no texts or calls. but since i was on wifi, data worked.

the OP's daughter must have been on wifi at the time. which is well known to allow BBM to work independently from the cell tower when its unavailable.

I can't speak to the OPs situation because obviously, I wasn't there.
In my instance, on Friday, power was down. There was no wifi.

Last year, during the DC quake, we were at work where wifi is not permitted.

Thing is, the data packets for BBM are tiny, so that they can get through in dodgy situations where voice, email, or conventional texting fail.

[otacon]

How did a thread about good things about BBM turned into a flaming war!! Come on people, the OP had some good news and was happy with the service. Be happy about it and not trying to prove yourself right.

Anyway, good to hear that in times of crisis, BBM was able to work (whether it was Sprint, RIM or God).

[louzer]

well, imessage and BBM can be used without cellular service. the iphone and blackberry dont need to be actively connected to a cell tower in order to transmit data over their respective messaging applications. case in point, i can imessage from my ipod or ipad when im on wifi, or email anyone as well. same thing with BBM. i was able to BBM people when the tower on the island i was on was down. no texts or calls. but since i was on wifi, data worked.

the OP's daughter must have been on wifi at the time. which is well known to allow BBM to work independently from the cell tower when its unavailable.

She was not in a wifi area. She was walking all around the city able to BBM me from anywhere. I don't care why. I don't care how. All I care about is that she was able to communicate with me that she was OK while others were not able to do the same. And, for that, I'm happy to be a BB user.

[robsteve]

Magic. Great job by Sprint. Phone down but BBM up.
Amazing.

You must be pretty new to cell phones. When things happen and everybody picks up their phones to make a call the system jams up even when they do have a cellular connection. This even happened and probably still happens with wire line phones. In an emergency there are only so many circuits and when you pick up the phone, there is no dial tone because there switch has no more circuits. The same thing happens with SMS messages.

BlackBerry goes back to the very early days of data services, so it is probably pretty frugal with the network and able to get out the BBM.

[belfastdispatcher]

Over and over again it has been proven BBM keeps working when networks are partially down or seriously overloaded, there has been a front page editorial about it, non believers should go back and read it but the gist is this, a sent BBM will not fail until days later and until then it keeps trying to send until a little break in the overloaded network is found and thanks to the compression and RIM's NOC the bbms get trough when other packets of data of voice fail.

[eve6er69]

I love that during sporting events when local towers are overloaded and when power goes out towers get cluttered and overloaded bis still works. Thanks to the noc and data compression. Can get by on a limping tower.

Worked flawlessly for me during hurricane irene.

Sent from my Bold using Tapatalk

[anon(1544756)]

Most of the time when I am at home, my BIS goes over the WiFi. I am looking at the service status right now. And it clearly shows Blackberry Internet Service connection is Wi-Fi. The BIS icon on the banner is next to the Wi-Fi bars, not next to the 3G bars.

BBM does travel over Wi-Fi as long as it can connect to BIS.

[belfastdispatcher]

Most of the time when I am at home, my BIS goes over the WiFi. I am looking at the service status right now. And it clearly shows Blackberry Internet Service connection is Wi-Fi. The BIS icon on the banner is next to the Wi-Fi bars, not next to the 3G bars.

BBM does travel over Wi-Fi as long as it can connect to BIS.

Of course it does, who said it didn't? Turn signal off and watch BBM work over wifi.

[bigbadben10]

How did a thread about good things about BBM turned into a flaming war!! Come on people, the OP had some good news and was happy with the service. Be happy about it and not trying to prove yourself right.

Anyway, good to hear that in times of crisis, BBM was able to work (whether it was Sprint, RIM or God).

Yeah go figure eh! BBM rocks plain and simple!

[Davec1234]

Unless rim has an outage, that never happens eh?

[Masahiro]

Unless rim has an outage, that never happens eh?

Maybe one or two days a year on average?

[louzer]

Maybe one or two days a year on average?

On average? They had a bad couple of days last fall. But other than that, RIM has near perfect uptime statistics that are the envy of the industry. The reason the news of the outage was so big was because of how reliable the RIM network is.

[belfastdispatcher]

Unless rim has an outage, that never happens eh?

Everything has outages, gmail, yahoo mail, imessage, siri, icloud and yes, bis too but not often.

Lol, a local bank here is having a massive outage, search for "ulster bank"