What is BIS?
BIS stands for Blackberry Internet Service. Basically, this is a service from your provider that lets you receive email and access the internet on personal Blackberries. BIS differs from BES, or Blackberry Enterprise Server, in that BIS retrieves personal email whereas BES retrieves corporate email and is tied to a corporate entity.
What kind of usage does BIS cover?
BIS covers the data usage clocked on Blackberry devices. Plans from our 3 Telco’s (M1, Singtel, Starhub) are either 1GB or 3GB. Usually tethering is not covered.
All the plans cover basic data usage – meaning you can:
- surf the internet
- use RIM’s official applications and services, and
- use 3rd party applications.
To date, SingTel’s 1gb BIS is the only plan that is unable to do all three. Instead, it only allows a user to use RIM’s official applications and services.
How does BIS email work?
Data transmitted via BIS are handled securely by the Blackberry Servers.
The Blackberry servers will check for new messages every fifteen minutes by default. If it does find a new message, the message is compressed, and the first 2kb of data is then pushed to the device. For the next fifteen minutes, the BIS will check every three minutes for new mail. If no new mail is found within that second set of fifteen minutes, the server reverts to again checking once every fifteen minutes. As long as the server finds new mail within that time frame, it will continue to check every three minutes. This does not, however, apply to all email accounts. Gmail and Yahoo mail are two notable exceptions to this rule. The BIS remains constantly connected to these services, and will push new email automatically to the device, without the fifteen minute interval.
However, it is reported that there can be severe lags for Hotmail services. It may take up to a few hours for it to be pushed to your device.
