RIM wins temporary India reprieve

Michael Carroll | August 31, 2010

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RIM has won a two month reprieve for its messaging services in India while the government evaluates a monitoring solution it supplied to access encrypted data.

India’s Department of Telecommunications will test RIM’s technical solution for 60 days to evaluate if it provides security agencies with enough access to BlackBerry e-mail and messaging systems, WSJ.com reports.

Home ministry spokesman Onkar Kedia confirmed the deal late yesterday, just a few hours before BlackBerry messaging services in the country were barred under an Indian government deadline imposed three weeks ago.

Kedia said the solution involves a server located in India, WSJ said, despite RIM previously stating it never supplied servers to individual countries.

The Indian government also plans to serve Google and Skype with notices to set up local servers in India for the same purposes, according to the Times of India, and Nokia will have a local server up and running for enterprise-class messages by November, WSJ reported.

Analysts said a deal between the government and RIM was inevitable, given the importance of India to RIM and other smartphone vendors.

India already has an estimated one million BlackBerry users according to the Economic Times, while research firm Informa Telecoms & Media predicts the number of smartphones sold in the market will hit 40 million in 2015, up from 12 million this year.

RIM last week blasted India’s strict laws on communications, claiming they would stifle the country’s status as a global business market.

Source:

Michael Carroll