Blackberries Clogging Up GPRS?

I've noticed that the GPRS connection from my phone seems to be getting slower and slower lately.

I was trying to give a demonstration of a mobile site earlier today and it was taking about a minute a page to download. I'm not talking about really large pages, certainly less than 20k including images.

Interestingly, the demonstration was to O2, and even though I'm not on their network, they were able to explain why things were so slow.

It's down to the increased use of Blackberries. Not the fruit, but the handy mobile email device that are currently all the rage in the business community.

Due to their always online nature, they sap the limited GPRS capacity on offer per cell, slowing down the service for everyone else. This means busy areas such as central London, mainline railway stations etc have very slow connectivity rates. Hopefully 3G will be the silver bullet here that can provide greater bandwidth to accommodate the growth in connected devices.

Time to ban the Blackberry, until the time I get one that is. :-)