The Home Ministry of India has asked telecom operators to halt certain BlackBerry services until an approved monitoring system that will allow the government to intercept and decrypt messages sent between BlackBerry devices and the secure network they run on is put into place.
The department of telecommunications (DoT) and Research in Motion have been going back and forth with proposed solutions to India’s security concerns for the past several weeks without coming to a general consensus and thus, the government has issued temporary ban on all PIN messaging, BIS email, and BES email.
Sources say that RIM has asked that the be given until the end of the month to address the security concerns. BlackBerry service is still working right now, however, the heat is on for RIM. India represents way too big an opportunity for RIM not to come up with an acceptable solution.
Why the indian government is against BlackBerry release, that is still a question mark for me, well if they are having problems then why temporary relaxation, Confuse!!
SKhan – The Indian Government is NOT against Blackberry Services. They just want to be able to monitor Blackberry Messages being sent from one device to another in India. At the moment, that is NOT possible because all messages & data between blackberry devices are 128 BIT encrypted. The only possible solution it seems is that Blackberry install a server in India which would make it possible for Indian Intelligence Agencies to monitor the data. And what I do NOT understand is why RIM would be hesitant to provide a separate server in a country with a customer base of half a million which spends an average of $22 for usage of blackberry services apart from their mobile phone bills. This is with very low advertisement expenditure on RIM’s part.
If they could install their servers, spend a calculated budget on advertisements in India and release their devices in India with atleast a third party support provider whom they’ll find dime a dozen in India, they can easily scale up their customer base to atleast 2 million in a single year. Then there should be no looking back in a country with a population of more than a billion people and more than enviable number of business /enterprise users.
I heard the problem is that RIM is trying to set up an offshore technical support helpline for the Indian Government in Des Moines but that the government employees can’t understand them when they call in to it.