The BlackBerry wireless e-mail service from RIM (Research In Motion Ltd) seems to have suffered a widespread outage starting from Tuesday evening in the U.S.

According to NewsChannel4, “Officials with RIM said they are trying to reset the system and that their concern was with the backlog of data, which will rush through when it comes back on line, could cause a bigger problem”.

The main suspect in this instance is that the outage is probably caused by one of RIM’s Network Operating Centre (NOC) going down.

If you can recall from my earlier write-ups on the BlackBerry, the BlackBerry system works around the concept of a central “hub” system. Whilst the individual BlackBerry handhelds are configured to connect with their respective BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), what happens at the Telco level is that all communication from a BlackBerry device is actually transparently routed to RIM’s NOC.

On the other end, the BES itself connects directly to the NOC via the Internet as well. This setup ensures that no firewall configuration is necessary on the network that the BES is located. Data security is generally not a concern as all communication between the BlackBerry handheld and the BES is encrypted at the packet level. And because the NOC has direct line-of-sight to the individual BlackBerry devices, it is able to proactively cache and then forward any packets from the BES to the BlackBerry every time the BlackBerry “logs on” the GSM network.

This setup is also the reason that your Telco must exclusively support the BlackBerry for your handheld to work on their network. Also, a plain GPRS, or data connection will not work as well, even if your Telco does sell the BlackBerry service. You must specifically have your Telco to “provision” your line for the BlackBerry – usually at an additional subscription cost.

As with everything, there are advantages as well as drawbacks to this NOC approach, one of the main ones being battery life as the handheld need not maintain an open GPRS connection like Microsoft’s Direct Push solution (How does Direct Push really work?). Also, because the overhead of their custom protocol is very low, the data volume that is transmitted is also significantly lower. (Which Uses Less Traffic: BlackBerry Push Or Microsoft Direct Push?).

The downside here of course, is that the entire BlackBerry experience resides almost 100% on the stability of the NOC – rare as it might be. And when the NOC goes down, the traffic piles up, further exacerbating the problem for when the network recovers.

I wonder how long this outage will last, and what will RIM say on this.

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