RIM ups subscriber forecast: can infrastructure support the new users?

The BlackBerry maker upped its subscriber forecast this morning, a day after some of the company’s popular devices were rendered useless on the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada.

The second BlackBerry blackout in as many weeks casts doubt on the company’s ability to support the two million new customers it expects to add this quarter which ends on March 1. RIM’s revised forecast is 15 to 20 per cent higher than the 1.8-million figure it gave in December.

Yesterday, users of RIM’s BlackBerry Internet Service (like yours truly) were without service for some of the morning. One BlackBerry outage newsgroup claimed half of BIS users in the Americas were without service - members of the group began reporting problems at around 6 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast. The issue appeared to get progressively worse, initially affecting about half of users in the Americas but eventually affecting all users. The blackout only affected users of the BIS service - last week it was BlackBerry Enterprise Service users that were left without their CrackBerrys for hours.

RIM’s corporate communications department chalked up yesterday’s BIS outage to regular maintenance work. No word as to whether BIS users were warned of the update beforehand.

A wise man named Vint Cerf (yes, the man who is widely credited as a "co-founder" of the Internet,) once told me RIM’s problem was one of stochastic instability (a prize of some sort to anyone who can explain the concept in layman’s terms please and thanks.)

I took that to mean the company’s rapid subscriber growth has put undue strain on its infrastructure (e.g. the network operating center) but I could be wrong.

My experience and that others over the past two weeks makes one wonder however.

February 21, 2008 | Filed Under News Items and Commentary