[Omnitech]

It's gotten to where no one can keep up with all the threads people keep starting here about "Where did BIS go? Why?"

So I'm creating a FAQ.

First of all I will refer you all on my general post on email and syncing on Blackberry 10. In that post I go into extensive detail about the various email connectivity options available to Blackberry 10, explain them as well as the traditional BIS, or "Blackberry Internet Service" system.

BB10: The tl;dr on email retrieval and syncing


Secondly, I'd like to borrow Brian Peterson's excellent post on why he will not miss BIS on new-generation Blackberry devices. I think he's done as good a job as any enumerating the various issues with BIS for modern Blackberry users:

I don't know about you but I am ecstatic that they killed off that terrible BIS garbage.

Why was it garbage:
-Browsing was terribly slow
-Compression dogged any video streaming
-Weird Service Book problems
-Crappy POP3 email support (now you can refresh your pop3 with a swipe, without waiting for that 15 minutes NOC interval)
-ActiveSync Support
-I don't need a plan to use the device. If I want a "iPod touch" all I have to do is use Wifi, and the device works minus phone calls and texting
-My email keeps working when the NOC goes down. No more yearly "OMG RIM SUCKS"
-Programmers don't need to write weird detection logic in code (Do I have BIS, do I have BES, does their carrier allow direct connections). You know those weird setup detection wizards in apps! Now they are gone!!!
-No more weird attachment limits
-They don't try and mess with my HTML email
-No more lame download limits
-Downloads start right away... Not waiting for all that lag for the NOC to wake up

Bottom line, anybody who thinks BIS getting killed off is a bad thing is crazy. Killing of BIS will be one of the most important things to make BB10 perform the way everyone wants! Fast, speedy and without limits!

Now you may not agree with all of Brian's points, but most of them truly have an impact on the usability of a modern Blackberry device. For example, the web browser. Blackberry has gotten a lot of criticism in recent years because of the sluggish and overall disappointing performance of its smartphone web browsing experience. As anyone knows who has used Blackberries as well as competitive devices, that criticism was certainly well-founded.

With the initial Blackberry 10 device the Z10, RIM/Blackberry has done a fabulous job of leaving behind the legacy of poor web browsing performance, by creating an outstanding new web browser with top-notch performance. But accomplishing that is not simply a matter of writing a good web browser - the platform that web browser runs under is another key component. The Z10 is the very first 4G LTE device from Blackberry. But 4G LTE web-browsing power would have been severely crippled if web traffic had to be routed, as traditional Blackberries did, through BIS. BIS adds quite a bit of overhead to high-speed web activities, and that overhead would have made it impossible to compete effectively in the marketplace against other popular smartphone devices. It would have been like shooting yourself in the foot.

5 or 10 years ago, BIS provided a number of benefits to users at a time when internet traffic was far lighter and people were mostly using legacy email systems such as "POP3". But today, most personal smartphone users are using some form of webmail or synced email, and most corporate users are using either Microsoft Exchange or a workalike. The advantages that BIS once provided are no longer necessary for the majority of users, while the restrictions and limitations of BIS have become a real liability for Blackberry's competitiveness in the modern marketplace.

Another aspect of BIS is its carrier provisioning aspect - in order to provide BIS services, mobile carriers had to implement special provisioning and management architecture to make it all work. This adds complexity and cost. Once again, to be competitive, Blackberry must contend with a market where its competitor's demands on a carrier's network are much less in many ways than what would be necessary for a carrier to support BIS.

Once upon a time, the data-compression provided by BIS gave carriers the flexibility to offer aggressive price-plans that in some markets (particularly the developing world) were a unique advantage for Blackberry users. But the modern marketplace, with its explosion of huge, pre-compressed digital media files, has turned what once was a BIS advantage into a significant competitive liability. Now BIS compression is less of a benefit, and more of a drag on performance.

Some people have worried that if Blackberry abandoned BIS it would destroy their competitiveness in the developing-world. But it needs to be said that no other competitor is in a superior position to RIM/Blackberry even without BIS carrier provisioning. In fact, BIS still is used for other unique Blackberry services, such as Blackberry Messenger or BBM. But unlike the carrier provisioned BIS, this simply runs over a regular internet connection and does not require special infrastructure and management by the mobile carriers. Once again, this is a competitive advantage for Blackberry.

In addition, many carriers in the developing-world that have rolled-out Blackberry 10 devices have announced special "social plans" that while they offer similiar tiered data-usage as other smartphones currently on the market, they also offer free and unlimited BBM usage, which once again puts Blackberry into a unique value position in the market. No other competitor has this advantage today. So to claim that Blackberry is no longer competitive because Blackberry 10 is doing-away with carrier-provisioned BIS, is an unfair characterization.

Also bear in mind that Blackberry intends to continue selling and supporting traditional Blackberry devices, along with BIS carrier provisioning, in markets where it remains a popular option. But I think the overall advantages of the newer Blackberry platform will consistently attract customers who want to take advantage of its various fundamental improvements over not only traditional Blackberry devices, but also any other smartphones on the market today.

Here is a post I wrote that demonstrates what some worldwide carriers in developing areas are doing to support the "Blackberry faithful":

http://forums.crackberry.com/news-ru...ape-up-782424/

Lastly, a quick list of some of the reasons why taking this path is a good strategic idea for Blackberry as a company:

1. Very expensive infrastructure to maintain and operate
2. Downtime exposes the company to lots of negative publicity
3. Special requirements of carriers for BIS support undermines carrier support at a time when Blackberry desperately needs it
4. Revenue model of BIS is no longer sustainable for carriers to provide flat-rate services when customer data-usage is skyrocketing
5. BIS performance degradation would handicap the public perception of the new-generation Blackberry product (ie the BB10 native web browser would NEVER reach the performance it does if it were required to work through BIS like the legacy systems did)
6. New generation of 4G-LTE enabled Blackberry devices could potentially massively increase the traffic load on the global BIS network, resulting in A) even even worse performance loss for users, B) increased service outages and C) a sharp increase in capital expense and management cost for Blackberry as it would likely require substantial capacity upgrades to the global BIS infrastructure.

A few tidbits.

A new app for Blackberry 10 that not only gives people a way to poll their legacy POP3 servers as fast as they want (more often than the current minimum poll-time of every 15 minutes that Blackberry 10 offers by default), but also some neat notification features that many users will find handy:

http://forums.crackberry.com/app-ann...-calls-781778/

A detailed and technical discussion about troubleshooting "IMAP push email" on home WiFi networks where the equipment might be "push unfriendly":

http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...a-wifi-776355/



Since there persists an urban legend about the security of BIS, and because I keep seeing people repeating this urban legend, I am adding a link to a post in this thread where I compiled the various documents which clear that issue up below:

Link to post #92 in this thread - about BIS data security




I will try to update this post as time permits to enhance its comprehensiveness and accuracy.


.

[Bold_until_Hybrid_Comes]

Thank you for creating this

[Omnitech]

Thank you for creating this

The pleasure is mine! I spend too much time in these discussions as it is.

[FRG_RC]

Very good read. Thank you.

[belfastdispatcher]

it's all very nice for you but BIS was one of the main reasons I choose BlackBerry back in 2008 and the networks around here haven't got any better thus it would still be huge benefit to me. I'm considering going back to my 9900 for this reason. Il give it another month.

[BB Marissa]

When you consider how big a problem BlackBerry have had with their outages, its no wonder that BIS is being retired. There are many benefits to it but having whole continents without mail killed them.

[Omnitech]

it's all very nice for you but BIS was one of the main reasons I choose BlackBerry back in 2008 and the networks around here haven't got any better thus it would still be huge benefit to me. I'm considering going back to my 9900 for this reason. Il give it another month.

Actually I think you have provided one of the few consistently plausible examples of someone with a clear and legitimate benefit from it that can't really be achieved any other way, given the nature of the signal coverage there and what you like to do with it. And the fact that you're not simply advocating for something because you don't want to learn anything new. Most of the people complaining about the email management features are in that latter group, from what I've seen.

It's a pity there are not enough people with the same situation/need to make the service continue to be a practical offering, at least from the evidence I can see.

[KemKev]

Excellent work, OP. This thread merits sticky status.

Posted via CB10

[bobauckland]

As has been said before.

Just a few examples, the push alternatives to BIS aren't yet as reliable, the sync isn't reliable for mail or contacts, the delete on server option being gone, the 30 day limit, the data compression is gone, the roaming charges.

Also, as has been said before

It's actually kinda funny if you look at it sort of impartially.
When the 9900 was the flagship, people here were talking about how you should choose a 9900 over the competition for 'true push email' and 'world class data compression'
Right until the launch of BB10 where BIS was unceremoniously dumped.

Now suddenly it's 'BIS was holding BlackBerry back' and 'Grow up, we don't need it'
The blindness is almost on Apple levels, and if the same thing happened to Apple and Apple users CrackBerry and it's users would be all over them.

Also, when the BIS infrastructure is up, anyone who thinks BB are choosing to do away with it, probably hasn't considered all the possibilities.
They couldn't get BBM on the PlayBook in 2 years.
Something tells me that they couldn't get QNX to play nice with the NOC except in very specific situations and that's the only reason it's been dropped, otherwise it would have at least remained as a paid option.
No one chooses to just drop a system that they're famous for, that's still making them money.

[mparker]

It's actually kinda funny if you look at it sort of impartially.
When the 9900 was the flagship, people here were talking about how you should choose a 9900 over the competition for 'true push email' and 'world class data compression'
Right until the launch of BB10 where BIS was unceremoniously dumped.

Unfortunately for RIM, the people who left blackberry for other platforms weren't the ones who were saying that.

I left Blackberry a few years ago during one of those week-long BIS outages. I can handle getting my email every 15 minutes, I can't handle being without it for weeks at a time. And even the whole 15-minutes wait was a worst-case thing. Most email servers use EAS or IMAP, which are push protocols, and for POP the email clients on both Android and Windows Phone 7/8 would poll more quickly after you sent a message, just like BIS. This used a bit more battery, but to be honest the real battery drain on a modern smartphone is the fast CPUs and the big bright screens. The old blackberries weren't battery-sippers because of BIS and BES, they were battery sippers because they had a small screen and slow CPU's.

The Z10 is pretty nice BTW; the device flows much better than WP (which itself flows much better than Android or iPhone). The email client isn't as nice as the one on WP8 (30-day WTF?), but the keyboard is better than even the one in WP7.0 (WP's virtual keyboard has gotten worse each iteration since WP7.0).

[Omnitech]

Roaming charges: Not BBRY's doing or problem.
Sync: better on BB10
Data compression: increasingly immaterial as the post points-out, handicaps lots of other things

[bobauckland]

Roaming charges: Not BBRY's doing or problem.
Sync: better on BB10
Data compression: increasingly immaterial as the post points-out, handicaps lots of other things

The entire post above is purely your opinion, one which a lot of people disagree with.

Posted via CB10

[Sharrief Wilson]

Can someone post the best solution for gettting Yahoo emails the fastest, i currently pay for Yahoo plus email service will that help me get yahoo emails real time?

[Omnitech]

Can someone post the best solution for gettting Yahoo emails the fastest, i currently pay for Yahoo plus email service will that help me get yahoo emails real time?

Yahoo uses a proprietary "push" email system that for some reason did not make it into Blackberry 10. It was part of the previous Blackberry products. (I get Yahoo email on my Bold 9650 almost instantly, to this day.)

I speculate that Yahoo has either recently changed the licensing terms for access to their proprietary push email notification system, or Blackberry chose not to incorporate proprietary email protocols of any kind in Blackberry 10. The reason I'm leaning toward the first explanation is that both Android and Windows Phone have exactly the same issue with Yahoo email now: no "push" available.

Apple seems to have linked Yahoo into their own proprietary "Apple Push Notification" system, which means on Apple devices you probably still get fast Yahoo new message notifications.

What mitigates the Yahoo issue somewhat on Android and Windows Phone platforms is that Yahoo makes a proprietary, dedicated email app for those platforms. Yahoo has not chosen to do the same for Blackberry 10 yet.

So if you want to stick with Yahoo and you want "faster than 15 minute" new message notifications, you can either setup Yahoo to forward messages to another email service that will provide fast new mail notifications (ie Gmail, Outlook.com, etc) or wait for Yahoo or a 3rd-party developer to write a special Yahoo email app that provides the quick notifications.

[Omnitech]

i currently pay for Yahoo plus email service will that help me get yahoo emails real time?

I'll have to look into what Yahoo Plus offers over the regular, free service. Used to be that that gave you POP3 access among other things, but that's not going to help with making email notifications faster.

Will do some research on that.

[Omnitech]

Here's another option for people who want quicker email notification for providers like Yahoo that don't provide it natively in BB10.

The following $2 app, in addition to its other features, claims to be able to reduce the email sync period from the typical BB10 minimum of 15 minutes, to as often as every 60 seconds.

Bear in mind that this could cause a significant hit on your battery life, especially if you are doing this on multiple email accounts. Testing before purchasing may be advised.

http://forums.crackberry.com/app-ann...-calls-781778/

[Omnitech]

Note: Added list item #6

[yvpan1]

I'll have to look into what Yahoo Plus offers over the regular, free service. Used to be that that gave you POP3 access among other things, but that's not going to help with making email notifications faster.

Will do some research on that.

Thank you Omnitech, you definitely deserve a sticky thread for your article post here. this is very useful.

yeah, i firstly chose blackberry as my mobile solution due to its push email technology, thanks to the ultimate BIS. back in 2008 when I firstly joined the BB bandwagon, i felt myself so cool as my phone could receive emails instantaneously even most of the time, I received emails faster than the refresh rate of my email's web client!

but then from time to time i realised, relying on BIS has a number of limitations. as what Omnitech wrote on the above:
- latency
- email attachment limit: 8MB max?? come on.. what year are we now? other phones can receive tons of attachments without any limit imposed to that!
- download limit: yeah.. what is that??
- reduced speed: well, at some point i understand this, rather than having a deep variation in speed, BIS normalizes the throughput so in almost every occasion you will have a steady and stable internet connection. BUT, even though you are on the 3G network you still can't open up the website as quick as other phones
- data compression: i kinda say.. yes and no. Yes, as compression means being friendly to the network. NO, as compression will reduce the throughput and BIS does that

with QNX and the playbook i have seen the outlook that someday BB will release its devices from the dependency of BIS. and here we have now the BB10. i firstly had a thought that losing the dependency to BIS will mean surging my data usage by a ton, but i now can have what i couldn't get when i was on BIS. so in this case, i am very happy for BB10 not to be dependent of BIS anymore. of course for corporate users, for the sake of corporate security they will need to engage the BES 10 and the Mobile Fusion to unleash the BB balance technology.

as with the yahoo, thank you for your explanation. i now fully understand what's happening. yeah, when i was back on my BIS days, all my yahoo email accounts worked like a charm. emails were delivered instantaneously, but since i'm using the Z10 now, seems I need to refresh to pull my emails from my yahoo mails. but it doesn't really matter for me, it's just a change of habit. hopefully Marissa Meyer now sees the power of BB10 and turn her thoughts around to support BB10 for their yahoo services.

KEEP MOVING, BBRY!

[ssbtech]

"No other competitor has this advantage today. So to claim that Blackberry is no longer competitive because Blackberry 10 is doing-away with carrier-provisioned BIS, is an unfair characterization."

The fact that BB had this feature that other phones didn't have did indeed make BB more attractive to many users. iOS and Android (iDroid) devices clearly have better application and hardware ecosystems that have been evolving for years. BlackBerry 10 doesn't have this. It's fresh, it's new and there's still questionable support from developers and virtually no 3rd party hardware support. I don't think we'll ever see a fraction of hardware accessories for BB10 as we do now for iOS devices.

Removing some of the uniquely provisionable services such as unlimited BBM doesn't put BlackBerry on a level playing field as other devices, you still need to look at all the other games played on the field.

I'm also sick of hearing people complain about attachment limits, 15 minute sync (honestly, how often do you need to check your email?) and other limitations as if those limitations couldn't have been addressed, improved and upgraded. Constantly whining that "BIS never let me do that" is just like saying "BlackBerry never let me play Angry Birds, why would I want a Z10?" Well, let me tell you - platforms evolve, Angry Birds now grace the Z10 and BIS attachment limitations could have grown.


Instead of continuing to offer simple email management, users are stuck with complex new technologies that may or may not work depending on your service provider and the features offered. Some here would say "well just switch to a new provider" as if it is a perfectly reasonable workaround. For many, it's not. The beauty of BIS is that you weren't forced to use cloud services to have a sync'd calendar that may or may not get the appointment times correct.

There's no reason why an improved BIS couldn't work in harmony with newer technologies. BIS email services could simply have just been one more way to set up emails on BB10. IMAP, EAS, BIS. Pick one, whichever you want.

[dejongj]

Two way imap sync was a big negative for me, well the lack if it naturally. So after many many years I finally jumped ship as the awful bis is no longer required and I can finally integrate it with my other devices.

Imap, carddav, caldav all fantastic open standards very welcomed by me who'd wouldn't have gotten a blackberry until they change that

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

I'm also sick of hearing people complain about attachment limits, 15 minute sync (honestly, how often do you need to check your email?)

You need to get out more often and OBSERVE people around you. If you did, you would notice, among other things, MANY HUNDREDS of posts here with people bitterly complaining that they don't get their email fast enough if for some reason it gets delayed a minute or three.

Instead of continuing to offer simple email management, users are stuck with complex new technologies that may or may not work depending on your service provider and the features offered.

"Complex new technology", invented in 1986. Yup. Here we go again. You're a one-trick pony.

Feel free to stick with one of those original Blackberry pagers if that's all you feel comfy with, but something new is not automatically bad just because you don't understand it or refuse to change your habits about anything ever.

The beauty of BIS is that you weren't forced to use cloud services to have a sync'd calendar that may or may not get the appointment times correct.

BIS IS a cloud service.

There's no reason why an improved BIS couldn't work in harmony with newer technologies.

You have neither the technical understanding nor knowledge of the business and market big-picture to even remotely make such claims.

[ssbtech]

Imap, carddav, caldav all fantastic open standards very welcomed by me who'd wouldn't have gotten a blackberry until they change that

And all with questionable and inconsistent implementation.

If it doesn't sync 100% correctly 100% of the time, then it's useless.
Your data is on someone else's computer. If you're lucky, it's encrypted. With their keys.

With the number of people who are storing confidential documents, emails and other data in the cloud expanding, cloud services will increasingly come under attack as the pot of gold contained within grows. Travelling across the border? Perfect, expect Customs officers to ask you for your device - and the 10 years of emails now sync'd to it.

[dejongj]

And all with questionable and inconsistent implementation.

If it doesn't sync 100% correctly 100% of the time, then it's useless.
Your data is on someone else's computer. If you're lucky, it's encrypted. With their keys.

With the number of people who are storing confidential documents, emails and other data in the cloud expanding, cloud services will increasingly come under attack as the pot of gold contained within grows. Travelling across the border? Perfect, expect Customs officers to ask you for your device - and the 10 years of emails now sync'd to it.

Well speak for your self, it is synching just fine here but no software does it 100% that is just daft. Also bis did store your stuff in the cloud with their keys.




Posted via CB10

[ssbtech]

You need to get out more often and OBSERVE people around you. If you did, you would notice, among other things, MANY HUNDREDS of posts here with people bitterly complaining that they don't get their email fast enough if for some reason it gets delayed a minute or three.

Yes, and all I see are people gasping for the next Facebook update or email to come in like a fish out of water. It's incredibly frustrating to have a simple conversation with someone over lunch when they're constantly fingering their phone.

"Complex new technology", invented in 1986. Yup. Here we go again. You're a one-trick pony.

Feel free to stick with one of those original Blackberry pagers if that's all you feel comfy with, but something new is not automatically bad just because you don't understand it or refuse to change your habits about anything ever.

Technology should adapt to the user, not the other way around. EAS works great if you only have one email address, but if you have multiple it becomes a mess. Not only that, you end up with multiple calendars and contact lists. God help you if you pick the wrong calendar by mistake and end up double-booking. And you still haven't offered a solution to my need for messages from multiple accounts to be sorted into one folder structure on the desktop.

How does that apply to BIS? Because BIS didn't observe folder structures, there was no need to create folders on the server. Without folders on the server I'm free to sort messages how I please on the desktop. With folders on the server I'm stuck with the same structure on the desktop making it impossible to do what I need. And I do apologize, I didn't realize EAS was around back in 1986.

BIS IS a cloud service.

Yep, it is. But not one where 10 years of email are stored in a goldmine for hackers.

You have neither the technical understanding nor knowledge of the business and market big-picture to even remotely make such claims.

Please explain to me why it would be technically impossible for BIS to work on BB10. If the phone can keep a connection with EAS, why not BIS?

[ssbtech]

Also bis did store your stuff in the cloud with their keys.
Posted via CB10

Only until it was sent to my phone. No goldmine of data for hackers to steal.