Since most of us have horror stories of downloading new service packs minutes after it's released only to have 20-40KB/s downloads, if not lower, I'm curious how many of you experience absurdly slow download speeds from RIM's website on a constant basis? As a business customer, downloading 40-60MB carrier OS releases or 200MB+ service packs or 20MB hotfixes at 10-50KB/s is not all that attractive. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that RIM hosts so much content for download, but I think it would be best served if they took a better approach to serving downloads and hosted them off-site, with Akamai or some other company that specializes in content delivery and hosted downloads. Microsoft does it. Yahoo does it. Many other companies do it. They offer amazing download bandwidth. In a day and age where I typically download something from a major company, such as my downloads from IBM (typically 700MB for a CD image; 2-4GB for a DVD image) or Microsoft (depending on the application, it ranges up to multiple DVD images), I receive the file(s) at 1-2MB/s.

...at the very least, RIM should increase dedicated bandwidth available for these downloads. The only reason I think this is a bad idea is due to the consumer interfacing that RIM has with hosting the carrier OS releases.

Currently, I'm downloading BES 4.1 SP2 upgrade at a blazing 71KB/s. This is at 12:00 AM ET on a Thursday morning (or Wednesday night, depending on how you look at it). I wouldn't consider this, by any means, a peak time frame.

Anyhow, what are your thoughts, especially from the business customers' standpoints? Perhaps some of the RIM employees on here can pass this information on to their superiors and so on and so forth. This just appears to be one of those areas that RIM has failed to improve as their customer-base has exponentially increased. Bandwidth is at an all-time low these days, so these aren't our grandfathers' fiber lines anymore.

I agree. Between the slow speed and the frequent disconnects, it can be a real PITA to download patches and all.

Yep, just as I made my post, my download disconnected and I had to start over. After a second disconnect, I just logged into work and moved installation files I had downloaded before over to my FTP and am downloading from there. *sigh*

Totally Agree, it took me 7 attempts to down the 230MB SP2 yesterday, at 40k. It kept failing at either 30 or 90 odd MB

RIM should really improve their download service.

nothing more to say - it really sucks

All you guys should fire an email to and something will have to be done about it.

I guess I've been pretty lucky, but I've had pretty good luck with my dl's. Not sure I;ve had any dropped connections yet. That being said I still agree with your statement, for a company that must have one hell of a server farm to host the relay etc. you'd think they would be able to increase their ability to load balance or mirror all the product files by creating some kind of file serving farm... they *must* have an IT crew that can do this ...

Considering that they are just down the road from Canada's leading IT graduating university...

pretty hopeless IMHO...they seem to have made the switch to electronic software distribution without beefing up their servers, it's pretty embarrassing for a tech firm. Have they not heard of akamai or similar..although it will be a strange day when we go looking for BB SPs on a torrent site..

Software Fulfillment is hosted by EdgeSuite and runs at a cool 1.8-2.5MB/s. I find some irony in initial downloads for new customers versus maintenance updates from current customers. *sigh*

No real problems here. But, I wish they were more of a 'one-stop shop'. It's sometimes difficult and frustrating to find particular OS upgrades, etc. It would be nice if they hosted a links page that pointed to the latest/greatest...

Well, if carriers are your first level of support, then why would RIM want to release OEM versions of software without having the carrier certify it and train their personnel? Having it the way they do is probably the best way to do it from a support structure, although it may not appear that way to end-users who want the latest/greatest.

I think you've misunderstood me. I don't expect them to develop/host the downloads, just have a page with links to the carriers' page where the downloads can be found. Finding the correct page on a carrier's web site from which to download is sometimes like searching for a needle in a haystack. I would think carrier's would be happy to supply RIM with the URL's as it would make them look better in the end users' eyes.

So funny this thread came up today. Last night I downloaded both desktop manager 4.2 and SP3 for BES 4.1. It was ridiculously slow and the SP download failed twice at 25MB before it would download totally. And I know its not my internet connection.

For your downloading pleasure, please see the list I update on BlackBerryFAQ.com

BlackBerry Operating System Downloads - BlackBerryFAQ

Nice resource for downloads, Doug! Thanks for posting it.

Doug,

Thanks for the link. I usually refer to the sticky on this site but this is a nice reference. I'm just surprised that RIM doesn't maintain something similar.

And, my apologies to jibi for semi-hijacking this thread; not my intent.

Ciao