EMAIL OUTAGE HIGHLIGHTS ARCHITECTURE FLAW

Written by Adam Gosling

Thursday, 07 July 2005

The seven hour failure of a network link to Canada put Telstra’s Blackberry users wondering what happened to their email, highlights a quirk of the Blackberry service exposes local traffic to the vagaries of international communications systems. According to ZDNet a network link problem in Canada cause a massive data backlog which ground Telstra's BlackBerry network to a halt with users still experiencing delay for hours after the problem was fixed. The mobile email system has a peculiar architecture with all traffic worldwide being routed through RIMs email servers in Canada. With the speed of international networks normally quite good, this situation does not pose too much of a problem – until something goes wrong. All traffic going to and from Blackberry devices is (for some inexplicable reason) sent to Canada for processing. There it processed with any bandwidth consuming images and attachments stripped out of it before being formatted as text and relayed to the receiving device. Surely it seems logical for service providers in Australia to carry out this processing locally rather than relying on access to overseas servers to do this relatively simple processing task. Related news items Nokia E51: Smarter Than It Looks -19/09/2007 Telstra Launches Another Coonan Attack -12/09/2007 Doh! Phone Pirate Could Get Five Years -17/08/2007 Free iBurst Broadband In Sydney -16/08/2007 Fujitsu Siemens To Give Up On PDAs -13/08/2007 Newer news items HUTCHISON STILL LOSING -16/08/2005 THE FUTURE OF MOBILE REVENUE -11/08/2005 US MOBILES OUTSTRIP LANDLINES -10/07/2005 UNWIRED SECURES WiMAX SPECTRUM -08/07/2005 VODAFONE TRIALS 3G -07/07/2005 Older news items TERMINATION CHARGES TOO HIGH? -05/07/2005 ACA MOVES TO CONTROL MOBILE CONTENT -30/06/2005 MOBILE BROADBAND TO OUTSTRIP WIRELINE -27/06/2005 OPTUS INKS NINEMSN DEAL -21/06/2005 OPTUS TO DELIVER EMAIL TO PALMS -16/06/2005 Tag This Now: