DUBAI, UAE, October 12, 2011/PRNewswire - MySolutionInfo/ -- Despite reporting that all problems with its BlackBerry service had been amended on Monday, 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 initialise 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% 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.

His Excellency, 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. He will be joined by the Middle East's leading roaming specialists to overcome and debate all current roaming concerns in the region.

For more information, visit http://www.roamingsummit.com
For more information, visit http://www.iqpc.ae

Eileen Espelita, Marketing Manager
International Quality and Productivity Centre Middle East
T: +971-4-364-2975
F: +971-4-363-1938
enquiry@iqpc.ae