[SeikS]

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on CNN's "Larry King Live" Wednesday night that the only way he could communicate with his staff, in the days after Hurricane Katrina, were through Blackberry PIN messages. Nothing else worked.

This is a great case study for Blackberry's reliability!

[DavidE]

Originally Posted by SeikS

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on CNN's "Larry King Live" Wednesday night that the only way he could communicate with his staff, in the days after Hurricane Katrina, were through Blackberry PIN messages. Nothing else worked.

Did he mention which carrier his BlackBerry uses? Or if he was communicating over Mobitex or GPRS? Did he show his BlackBerry to Larry King? Enquiring minds want to know.

DavidE
www.davidenglish.com

[SeikS]

sorry, he just mentioned it to Larry King durring the interview, no clue what he has.

[TheWastedYears]

"They" say the only thing that was working at the WTC on 9/11 was the Blackberry, as well.

[jibi]

i would make a sarcastic comment about the NOLA Mayor and more than the BlackBerry would have been working and a lot of people wouldn't be dead, but i won't...

[jibi]

http://www.blackberry.com/news/press..._12_2003.shtml

[DavidE]

Found this RIM press release ("City of New Orleans Selects BlackBerry Wireless Solution") from December 18, 2003: http://www.blackberry.com/news/press..._12_2003.shtml.

Edit: Looks like jibi found the press release before I did. Darn my poor typing skills!

DavidE
www.davidenglish.com

[stonent]

Can we have his pin? Can I make him a buddy in BB messenger? Can I forward him messages from the nice people I've talked to that have opinions about him?


I think PIN would work because if there is no signal, it gets queued up until it hits a GPRS/iDEN/1xRTT tower.


Now that I think about it, the last episode of American Dad, someone swipes Dick Cheney's blackberry, it is blue and has an antenna so it was a Nextel phone. (Well on the cartoon it was) And then they proceed to prank call world leaders.

[mobilehavoc]

I was there in the middle of things on 9/11 and although at that point I didn't have a RIM/Blackberry, my colleagues did. It was the only way we were able to make it out that day...

A colleague PINed another,etc. and we were able to get a rental car in Brooklyn (walked across Brooklyn bridge) to where we needed to go. Without that, we would have been stuck in Brooklyn since they ran out of rentals pretty fast as you can imagine.

Truly amazing but then again this is because it was the Mobitex network...now with relying on carriers like Cingular, no matter how good Blackberry is...if Cingular goes down, so does your Blackberry

[brwntiger]

Exactly what I was thinking....I'm in Baton Rouge and when the power went out so did my BB....I don't see how he was able to get a PIN off without any power in the entire city......he most probably start shooting off PINs when he left NO....he did travel to Jackson, MS and then came back to NO after the storm passed. A message can't be queued in a tower without power....how does the phone register with it?

[stonent]

It doesn't queue in the tower, it queues in the phone. When wireless services are not available you will get a clock icon next to your message. As soon as the phone finds a suitable GPRS/IDEN/1xRTT/Mobitex connecton it will send the message.

If he was running a mobitex blackberry, then he probably easily got his message out as the Mobitex network is very robust.

When our people in Louisiana were there, we couldn't get cell coverage but our Nextel and/or Southern Linc phones were able to do Direct Connect.

Lucky that we recently gave all of our executives 7520s