Interview: RIM founder and CEO, Mike Lazaridis

In what way does RIM answer that challenge?

The most important thing we offer is our relationship with carriers. We work very hard to make sure they are successful and to make sure none of our products or applications put an unnecessary or detrimental load on their networks.

Consider the sheer number of devices that get put on these networks every year, and the different characteristics of voice traffic vs. data traffic, and you can see why that is important. Voice calls can only grow in terms of numbers of minutes. But data consumes all the available capacity of a network if you're not careful.

The amount of digital code space we need for a voice conversation has always been the same. There are only three things growing voice - cost, battery life and coverage. If you can talk for less cost, you might talk more often, but it is still limited - there are only so many minutes in a day, only so many days in the week. If you talked 24 x 7, that's the maximum you can consume.

For years, the cellular industry has built its forecasts, its models, its finance, its network capacity, on this voice equation, plus a little bit of data for SMS.

Blackberry was designed to work within those constraints. It was designed to scale very carefully for the carriers.

With data, you can go from an 8kbps voice channel to a 1Mbps data channel very easily - that's a very big discrepancy in capacity utilisation.

I think what the carriers are now discovering now is that as they bring widespread general purpose Internet applications onto the networks, the explosion of data use - which may appear exciting in the beginning - presents some very serious downstream issues.

So the carriers are starting to realise that while the Blackberry offers a very compelling experience, it is also a technology that very carefully conserves their precious network resources.

How does a Blackberry conserve network resources?

It's because we designed this system to work on a two-way paging network. Everything we do is deliberately designed to minimise waste.

That provides two big benefits - as a user it conserves your battery life. Every time you send information to the network from a mobile you drain the battery. Once you exceed a certain level of packet usage, just like a certain number of hours of calling time, your battery is dead. And that's a fact, that's physics. You can't get around that.

If you drain the device battery before the end of the day, the device is not very usable, not very compelling.

At RIM we are very careful about how the Blackberry sends and receives information. So for example if you take HTML email, much of it is spam. With the Blackberry, you at least have a choice of whether you want to read part of it or not. Even if you choose to open it, the device gives you more of the email as you start reading it.

Let's say you were to receive 10 or 20 emails you aren't going to read - with HTML, pictures, PDF attachments included - If I download those messages to any other device, it will drain my battery, use up network capacity, increase my bill - especially if you are roaming. If you have unsolicited download of information to the device in a full download capability, you're basically wasting battery, network resources and money.

That's why the only device consultants recommend or IT shops will even let you use when roaming is the Blackberry, because it minimises that data usage.

That might explain I guess, why carriers are getting so many new subscribers with the iPhone, but are actually sustaining losses on their bottom line?

I don't know why more people aren't noticing that.

The Blackberry can access a lot of data hungry consumer apps from the web, just as the other new devices too. How do these apps fare in terms of network utilisation on the iPhone, say, compared to the Blackberry?

With the Blackberry, we designed it such that the individual apps don't have to maintain their own TCP connection, their own presence database, their own push pipe. All the applications can register to the operating system, and the operating handles these tasks.

That means the apps can go into standby and wait. When another device or gateway sends a message that is pushed directly to the device, the operating system decodes that message - decides whether it goes to Facebook, to Instant Messaging, to SAP, to email.

And that's the most efficient way to do it.