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U.S. Congressmen Want Their iPhone

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 12:35 PM - by

In response to inquiries from members of the U.S. Congress, the Chief Administrative Office (CAO) has begun testing the Apple iPhone for possible distribution, according to The Hill on Tuesday.

"The reason we're trying them out is because we heard a lot of people wanted the option to have them," said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the CAO.


The distribution could come as early as the next session of Congress in January 2009. Currently, the mobile phone of choice is the RIM BlackBerry, with about 8,200 in use by Congress members and their staff.

Currently, the iPhone is not compatible with the BlackBerry Enterprise server, so a new system would have to be tested and rolled out. The move to add the iPhone looks to be expensive, even though the Congressional members and staff would have to pay for the iPhone itself out of the Member's Representational Allowance -- funded by the taxpayers.

The deliberative body isn't always quick to act, but in this case, the process of getting their iPhones seems to be moving along apace.

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Tiger said:

member since 17 Jun 2003 with 1018 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 23, 2008 12:57 pm

Since when has Congress worried about cost when it comes to their own benefits?

This is bad news however for RIM. Their whole existence in this country now can be linked directly to the congressional influence in their trial for survival not long back.

RIM was repeatedly warned that Mac users weren't happy with their lack of support. Apple has come back to bite them.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Oct 23, 2008 1:10 pm

Well, it's unAmaerican to use RIM! They're a Canadian company after all!

I Was kind of surprised that a McCain spokesman had mentioned a while back that John McCain helped create the Blackberry with legislation. Not very good to point out you helped a foreign company take jobs from Amaerica.

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vasic said:

member since 09 Aug 2005 with 279 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 23, 2008 1:17 pm

What I find fascinating is the power of a lobbying group in Washington. RIM is a Canadian company. Blackberry's service works through the Blackberry Enterprise Server. The BES communicates with the corporate mail server (Lotus Notes, Novel GroupWise, or MS Exchange) on one end, and RIM's data centre on the other end, which in turn communicates with carriers' networks. So, every single message sent from and received on blackberry passes through Canada on its way.

Isn't it comforting to know that the (often times) extremely confidential information exchanged by the elected representatives in the US leaves the country for a moment, on its way to the recipient?

At least iPhone talks directly to the Exchange server and, if it is connected to the EDGE or 3G tower on the US soil, the message never leaves US.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Oct 23, 2008 2:17 pm

AT&T had better improve coverage in the area surrounding the Capitol Building. When I was there in April, my iPhone hardly had any signal in front of several of the congressional office buildings!

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Oct 23, 2008 4:11 pm

Tiger wrote:
RIM was repeatedly warned that Mac users weren't happy with their lack of support. Apple has come back to bite them.

++

Companies ignore Apple at their own peril. So many still don't get it...

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