[gossett]

I was wondering what EXACTLY the proprietary blackberry network actually does. With verizon down I can't text or send mail or get on the internet. Some things come in like facebook (?) and I can get there but i'm dead in the water. So what does the $30 a month actually get us?

[Reed McLay]

Research in Motion maintains the network operations center in Waterloo Ontario, BIS manages the flow of messages.

If your carrier is not able to maintain the flow of messages to the NOC, there is a regional outage. That is typicaly a hardware issue and it will get fixed quickly.

If the Research in Motion NOC goes down, the outage is universal and the World notices.... a lot.

[gossett]

Thank you! I had always kind of wondered

[mdude85]

Research in Motion maintains the network operations center in Waterloo Ontario, BIS manages the flow of messages.

If your carrier is not able to maintain the flow of messages to the NOC, there is a regional outage. That is typicaly a hardware issue and it will get fixed quickly.

If the Research in Motion NOC goes down, the outage is universal and the World notices.... a lot.

But without a working internet connection, none of that can even be accessed by the handheld. Verizon supplies the working internet connection, an "unlimited" amount of data transfer for a flat fee.

[Reed McLay]

The question set me seeking more information.

Google News "blackberry outage" has returned some interesting content.

BlackBerry service outage AGAIN!
...
there was another massive BlackBerry outage yesterday. ...

However, none of the other 9 blogs that linked to the story are able to cite a source, or even agree on a when the problem actually occured.

Digging a little deeper, I see:

T-Mobile experiencing widespread outage
November 3, 2009 4:56 PM PST
...

Vodafone suffers network outage
2:27PM GMT 12 Nov 2009
...

I suspect there were some short lived carrier outages, but there is no evidence of a large scale outage.

[dcgore]

wow, i have noooo idea what you guys are taking about...lol

[BlackBerryr]

wow, i have noooo idea what you guys are taking about...lol

haha same. i think its like a power outage, except with bis? haha :P