Saudi Arabia’s telecom watchdog said late Saturday it has extended the deadline of its ban on BlackBerry messenger service in the country until end of Monday.
The kingdom’s Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC) said Tuesday that it would ban BlackBerry’s instant-messaging service, starting Aug. 6, until the kingdom’s three mobile phone operators fulfill some regulatory requirements. The kingdom has around 700,000 BlackBerry users.
CITC didn’t say what those requirements were.
The ban deadline was extended “due to the efforts exerted by the mobile phone service providers in order to meet the regulatory demands of the commission,” and to test proposed solutions by the operators, CITC said in a statement.
Earlier Saturday, the telecom watchdog and local phone operators have reached a preliminary agreement with Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) over the handling of BlackBerry data that will involve setting up a server in the country, a person familiar with the talks said.
RIM has come under pressure from authorities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and several other countries in the region and beyond to provide greater access to the encrypted information sent by its BlackBerry devices.
The U.A.E.’s Telecommunication Regulatory Authority said it would block key BlackBerry services due to national security concerns from Oct. 11.
“The softening in RIM’s stance may have resulted from the growth potential offered by the Middle East market. Some 34 percent of RIM’s revenues in the latest quarter were from non-core markets, up from 23 percent in the same period of last year,” said Asim Shuja Bukhtiar, senior investment analyst at Riyad Capital.
Spokespeople for RIM in London couldn’t be reached for comment Saturday.