[belfastdispatcher]

One important point, when paying for BIS, BBM wasn't under pressure to be monetised as it was part if the BIS fee. Now in one or two years we'll start seeing ads and whatever else they figure out to make money with it. BBM was a private social network.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Omnitech]

Still, I'd take it back in a heartbeat.

Now where have I heard that before... hmmmm....???

Unless I misunderstand how it works, it seems like BIS is a tradeoff for the carriers: they pay BlackBerry a fee for subscribers on BIS plans, and in turn get less load on their data networks thanks to the compression. If they pass along that fee to the subscriber, then it seems like a win for the carriers.

Unfortunately it is not that simple.

Data compression only helps you if you have data that is compressible. A LARGE percentage of data today is NOT compressible, for a variety of reasons. This is a very different scenario than in the BIS heyday 5-7 years ago. Here are some examples why:

1. 5 years ago, MOST email traffic was being sent to/from endpoints to email servers UNencrypted. Today, MOST of that data is now being sent encrypted. You cannot compress encrypted data.
2. 5 years ago, MOST web traffic was sent UNencrypted and in the clear. Today, a LARGE percentage of web traffic is now sent over encrypted (ie SSL) links, and this is quickly increasing. Once again, you cannot compress encrypted data.
3. 5 years ago, MOST webservers either did not support, or did not enable native HTTP compression. Today, MANY webservers ALREADY pre-compress much of their web content. You cannot further compress already compressed data.

Next - the volume and size of data sent and shared around the world today is VASTLY larger, on average, than it was just 5 years ago.

For example, the size of a digital photo file is directly related to the number of pixels in its sensor. The larger the sensor sites or pixels, the larger the digital photo file will be, and if you want to send that file to someone, it will be a larger file attachment.

5 years ago, a digital camera with the same class of resolution that is now built into the camera in a BlackBerry Z10 or Q10 would cost you somewhere in the vicinity of $600 to $1500, just for the camera. (Yes, they have more features than the camera built into a smartphone, but in those days 8-10MP was nearly "state of the art", and you paid a high premium for that kind of technology)

Ergo, very few people were sending photos in email attachments with 8MP resolution. In many cases, if you had tried, it would never be received, because in those days many people's email providers were blocking emails with attachments larger than ie 5MB.

Today, we have smartphones with 41 megapixel sensors, not to mention professional cameras with even higher resolution.

Hopefully you can see where I am going with this: data sizes have exploded, email attachment sizes have exploded, video and audio streaming have exploded and increased in resolution. Just to stream a relatively low-res HD movie on Netflix today requires a broadband connection that was absolutely out of the reach of most people 5 years ago. And much of today's data is no longer compressible.

This is not your mom's smartphone. We can't just turn back the clock to the days when people were limited to 2MB file attachments on BIS and little tiny low-resolution screens and there was no such thing as an HD video stream, etc etc.

FAQ: Why does Blackberry 10 not include BIS?

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[stevobbm]

I'm on o2UK, my mobile data plan is a BlackBerry one, I use a Q10.
I thought BlackBerry data wasn't available for BlackBerry 10?



? via CB10 app on my BlackBerry Q10?

[Omnitech]

I think BIS has its place. Specifically. For parents who want to give their teen a device that gives them access to Facebook, Twitter, MSN Messaging, BBM, and maybe also email had a device to go to with the BBOS devices. Now, because the ports are no longer able to be blocked, a parent can still give a BB10 phone to their kid as parental controls can be enabled, but those same services are no longer able to be unlimited. Instead they rely on the regular data plan package.

The economics of providing BIS service at cheap "unlimited" prices has changed dramatically, and the content that people want to share has ballooned in size, people typically fail to take such things into account when they advocate for "turning the clock back to the old days".

Furthermore, BIS was introduced at a time when BlackBerry was the preeminent smartphone platform and they had the ability to drive their proprietary solutions into the market.

As everyone knows, this is certainly no longer the case, BlackBerry's marketshare is miniscule and carriers are much less likely to make special accomodations to implement a proprietary system that only serves a very very small fraction of their current or potential future userbase. Perhaps sad for some people but this is the reality.

Third-party browsers such as Opera give the user the option to use what was called Opera Turbo. It was similar to the BlackBerry NOC in that Internet traffic routed through a special server that compressed web pages, allowing them to load faster using less data. However, the biggest difference was that the user would go into the settings to turn on Opera Turbo. When trying it on one of my previous Android phones, (or maybe it was my old HTC Touch Diamond), the feature really did speed up the loading of websites significantly, and I did see a noticeable drop in my data usage as well.

I'm glad you mentioned Opera - specifically "Opera Mini" - which was the original product that did this so-called "compression". I'm an Opera user since almost the first year they released their very first web browser, around 1996. However "Opera Mini" and "Opera Turbo" is a separate kettle of fish.

In fact, you cannot compare that technology to BlackBerry's BIS compression, what Opera Mini (and what was later called Opera Turbo) actually did would be better described as "web mangling".

Because while it did do some compression - only if data was not already compressed - the main reasons it speeds up web browsing - particularly for the anemic and underpowered devices it was originally designed for such as "feature phones", Nokia Java phones and Blackberries - is because of 2 things:

1. It uses a proxy server that REFORMATS the web page and then sends back a simplified, "mangled" version back to the client. This is largely by replacing elements such as high resolution images with tiny, low-resolution substitutes, and by stripping out parts of the webpage that it considers "nonessential". Sometimes those "nonessential" parts are in fact, important. Which is why sometimes it will literally "break" webpages and prevent them from working properly.
2. It proxies SSL connections - ie "secure" transactions, by using a "man in the middle" proxy - which is the same technique hackers and governmental spies use to snoop on your secure web transactions. In other words - Opera has the ability to see everything you send back and forth to your bank and any other "secure" website. This is the only way their SSL proxy can speed up transactions, by basically unsecuring them. (In the sense that Opera gets to see everything)

So as you can see, there are significant tradeoffs in using such an approach, it is not a universal "Win/Win" for all web users. When I had Opera Mini on my legacy BBOS device (since the native browser was so poor), I would NOT use it for secure transactions like banking transactions, for this reason.

[belfastdispatcher]

I'm on o2UK, my mobile data plan is a BlackBerry one, I use a Q10.
I thought BlackBerry data wasn't available for BlackBerry 10?



? via CB10 app on my BlackBerry Q10?

BIS data plans work with any other smartphone out there, it's the other way around that's the problem.

[Tom689]

I definitely miss BIS the 5$ a month was worth it. Would do 10$ or more now.