I have an increasing problem with hung threads due to our network pipe slowing the MAPI calls to Blackberry Servers and am looking for opinions on how to solve this.

Background
All blackberry servers are located in Boise, ID. 9 of them total. We have 47 Exchange servers, of which only 10 are in Boise, ID........the rest at various locations around the US. 2400 users Most remote locations have less than 100 blackberry users.

Ping times range from 22ms to 63ms on average for most of the remote locations. Our problems are increasing as the ping times can hit 400ms for extended periods of time for some remote locations.

Question
What is the best way to solve this problem?

Increase bandwidth to these locations?

Put a remote blackberry server at these locations? Our SQL box is in Boise......what is the network traffic like for SQL? Run these remote locations on MSDE instead?


I think bandwidth is the best solution as we have failover boxes in Boise and increasing the bandwidth at other locations has solved the problem before. My big question is what is the difference in a remote blackberry server versus increasing the bandwidth?

You could sign up for some BES Express and just remove the CAL's from the servers and add them to the new BES in the remote locations... If you have two sites that have a ping time of less then 35 MS you could be a BES in that location and share the users between them.

If you wish you could use a single SQL server and just share the database the bandwidth between BES and SQL goes over TCP/IP so you are not limited by the MAPI subsystem. Or you could just install MSDE if it is going to be a small amount of users.

Cheers