Following last week's outage of RIM's BlackBerry service, many in business and government alike (that's Karl Rove and Company at right) are starting to wonder if their dependency on the device with such a soft underbelly (according to competitors) is such a good idea.

"The NOC-centric nature of RIM's solution has always been a target of its competitors in the past, but usually the competitive message has been FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] around security ('Do you REALLY want your data flowing through someone else's system?')," explained Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis. "NOC service outages are a huge gift to competitors' marketing departments, because service outages are real -- end users feel those."

Russell Shaw on the BlackBerry Beat gave a failing grade to carriers as well:

There were some bright points, but all in all I was not pleased with the information flow and presentation.

First, let us discuss how each major U.S.-based BlackBerry carrier conveyed this data when I called them.

T-Mobile and SprintNextel did best. As soon as I called the T-Mobile trouble line, I was greeted with a newly updated recording. Same when I called "611" from my Nextel BlackBerry.(read more)