BlackBerry Enterprise Service to be banned in Pakistan

Citing “security concerns,” Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior issued a directive to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES) beginning December 1st this year.

BES is BlackBerry’s business solution, operating in tandem with Exchange or Domino servers, the highly secure platform provides companies with autonomous, highly manageable features for BlackBerry devices as well as the applications they use, even how much access they have to different networks or services.

The PTA, in turn, sent letters to Pakistan’s mobile operators outlining the requirement that BES connectivity would be blocked by December. Interestingly, this ban will not affect BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), the company’s legacy consumer platform that allows previous generation BlackBerry smartphones to get online.

Since BES is primarily a business grade service, the PTA’s spokesman, Khurram Mehran, says that he does not expect this move to affect more than 5,000 users in the country. “There was a challenge that the BlackBerry email service could not be tracked or decoded, which leads to the security reasons” that were cited by the Interior Ministry.

source: The Express Tribune