Saudi Arabia has just opened Research in Motion’s services for its Blackberry phone across the kingdom. The suspension was lifted, but with conditions presented by the country to the Canadian company that it will give a system which will allow Saudi Arabian authorities to monitor the data by blackberry users. The country also allowed RIM to go beyond the deadline it gave the company to fix some of its technical aspects.
These aspects are primarily focused on meeting the demands of local laws. The fact that there is no deadline suggests, according to Simon Simonian, that a clear solution is imminent and will be implemented soon. Simon SImonian is an analyst from Shuaa Capital PSC. However, it is not yet official that a solution has indeed been met.
The decision by Saudi Arabia to ban blackberry’s services has been followed by other countries, including Indonesia, India, and the United Arab Emirates. The main concern among these four countries is that the messaging and email services of RIM’s phone can be a danger to national laws.
For Saudi Arabia, the problem is all about terrorism and how blackberry’s services can be used by terrorists for communication and other purposes. To resolve this, Saudi Telecom Co. and other rival companies are testing systems to monitor data from blackberry users.