As I write this, the major new organizations are reporting yet another BlackBerry service outage. The last one, about a year ago, should have served as a powerful warning that we can become too dependent upon systems that have inherent single points of failure. Such is not a good strategy, either for us users or our vendors. As wireless systems of all forms become ever more mission-critical, a fault-tolerant/redundant/etc. architecture and implementation become ever more important - again, both for us and our suppliers. You can see Network World's article on the current BlackBerry outage here.

One way to deal with this problem is to make sure we are not dependent upon any single element in the wireless value chain. Sure, we'd like to carry only one mobile subscriber unit, but why not make it two, even if the second is a bit crippled? That's what I do - a wireless PDA (a Motorola Q) and a simple flip phone with "Web" access. Both of my devices are on a single carrier's network, but that could be fixed. E-mail should be stored and managed on a separate e-mail service, and forwarded, if necessary, to the wireless e-mail service, like BlackBerry. I use 100% Web-based mail on all devices, which means that I can get to e-mail through any browser (OK, most browsers), even a stationary PC. The e-mail service itself is still a single point of failure, however; I'm working on that one, but a fundamental re-architecting of the whole concept of e-mail may be required to really solve this problem. But, in the interm, at least there are a few steps we can take to protect ourselves.

When I wrote about the last BlackBerry outage, I warned that suppliers simply must do better in the reliability department. We don't yet know the story as to what's the cause of the current outage, but we will shortly. And I'm willing to bet that RIM has still not learned its lessons here. As a consequence, we must.