Blackberry maker Research In Motion said earlier this week it would offer its user free premium applications to download onto their handsets as compensation for service interruptions last week.
In a conference call, Patrick Spence, Managing Director Global Sales and Regional Marketing at RIM, told The Star that the offer would be available on Blackberry services until December.
The Apps are estimated to be worth about Sh10,000 (US$100). Spence told The Star that last week’s outage which affected at least 13,000 Safaricom Blackberry users and another undisclosed number of Airtel users, was caused by a switch failure.
The company will also offer technical support for Enterprise and all other users, Spence said. He explained that when the switch failed and the backup switch did not kick in, a backlog was created that caused the service outage. “We move 22 terabytes of data each month,” Spence said. “In this case when the 22 terabytes is distributed across a number of days that caused a situation where we had to catch up.”
Spence said in addition, some partner carriers may choose to offer their customers compensation in terms of airtime. Airtel has already offered three extra days of the service for its customers.”We would like to compensate both our pre-paid and post-paid customers for the inconvenience as best we can. For our pre-paid customers, we will extend the subscription of the services for the month of October by three days. We are communicating this to our inconvenienced customers through sms,” Airtel Kenya COO Shivan Bhargava said in a statement.
