Research In Motion expects new Blackberry subscriber accounts to be 15 to 20 percent higher than the 1.82 million it forecast at the start of its current business quarter. And the Canadian handset maker said it expects total BlackBerry accounts to reach 14 million by March 1.
“BlackBerry smartphones proved to be a big hit throughout the holiday selling season,” said RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie. “The seasonal slowdown in net subscriber account additions that we expected in the new year did not occur and our focused execution with partners has continued to produce strong results within both enterprise and consumer segments.”
Growing Pains
RIM’s global listing of where its Blackberry handsets are being deployed resembles a world atlas. In the past two months alone, the company has announced deals with carriers in Bangladesh, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Lithuania, Madagascar, Mexico, the Netherlands, Qatar, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Uganda. But even as Blackberries proliferate, the company has had more complaints about service outages.
Two of the outages occurred this month. Industry analysts attributed these snafus to the fact that all Blackberry traffic must pass through the company’s servers and network operations center (NOC) in Canada.
Every mobile-service operator “has a NOC, and it is every carrier’s bread and butter to make sure that it is up and running,” said Godfrey Chua, IDC wireless research manager. On the other hand, Chua said all communications services are subject to outages, even on regular cell phones.
“RIM probably gets a little bit more attention than others because what they do is so specific and it’s what they are known for,” Chua said in a telephone interview. “It was a big deal last week at the Mobile World Congress because so many of the people attending were carrying RIM handsets and couldn’t…