Despite reporting that all problems with its BlackBerry service had been
amended, RIM’s (Research in Motion) BlackBerry outages continue across the
Middle East region for a second consecutive day.

These outages come at a time when the company is struggling to remain
relevant to competing smartphones such as Apple and Google.

The maker of the BlackBerry, RIM, said that the failure of a critical
piece of equipment and inability of a backup system to initialize had left its
users in several parts of the world without instant messaging service or
reliable web browsing.

“Some users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil,
Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays,” RIM
said in its statement. “We are working to restore normal service as
quickly as possible.”

The BlackBerry subscriber network in the UAE maintained the rapid growth
it has recorded since the handset was introduced a few years ago, with their
numbers increasing by roughly 50 percent annually.

UAE BlackBerry users exchanged more than 12.8 billion texts through
their handsets in 2010, nearly four times the total messages used by all other
mobile phones in the country.

“A large part of the BlackBerry users in the UAE are aged below 18
years,” said the Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory
Authority (TRA), which oversees the communications sector in the UAE.

The UAE, the largest Arab economy after Saudi Arabia, has one of the
highest mobile phone penetration rates in the world, standing at 178 percent at
the end of 2010. The rate is far higher than other countries in the region,
including the world’s richest nation Qatar, with a ratio of 129 percent.

IQPC’s Roaming & International Carrier Services Summit will address
concerns with local and international roaming services and identify the effect
of increased smartphones, like BlackBerry, have on data roaming.

Majed Al Mesmar, deputy director general of the TRA, will be delivering
the opening ceremony of this year’s Roaming & International Carrier
Services Summit to be held on the 4 – 7 December 2011 at Amwaj Rotana JBR,
Dubai, UAE.

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]