How available, stable, reliable is the exclusive BIS-B connection method on Blackberry?

Question

If you sign up for the RIM developer alliance program, you have the special BIS-B connection type available to your Blackberry applications.

Is this connection type more available, stable, and reliable than the other methods? We're connecting to web APIs, if that makes any difference.

Getting the other methods (Direct TCP through APN gateways, WAP, WAP2, Unite) to work properly in all cases is a bear so I'm hoping BIS-B is a good way to solve this issue for our app and help some customers that have a financial incentive not to connect through WAP connections.

Answer 1

BIS connections have worked pretty well for us. However, some customers (especially the once using Enterprise Servers) have BIS connections disabled and force all traffic through their MDS. So I'd always make sure your application has more then one way to connect to the web. But be careful - when your application tries using MDS connections as well as BIS connections, you might run into a probmel known as 'split-pipe', which is extremly hard to debug.

For security reasons some devices block applications to do both internal and external connections (MDS and BIS), they do this silently (so you're connections just fail) and it's permant as long as the application is on the device. There is a policiy on the BES to activate/deactive this and I havn't seen it always happening, sometimes BIS/MDS works just fine, but keep that in mind.