India will ban BlackBerry services if concerns not addressed

India is the latest country to threaten to ban the services, joining Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon in citing security concerns. The world’s largest democracy is also one of RIM’s fastest-growing markets for BlackBerry smartphones. If the ban takes effect, BlackBerry users in India would only be able to make voice calls and browse the Web.

Saudi Arabia announced this weekend that it has reached a preliminary agreement with RIM and local telecom providers that will allow the smartphones to keep functioning by operating over local servers subject to government monitoring. United Arab Emirates was the first country to ban some BlackBerry services last month; the government there is still in talks with RIM.

RIM has said it is unable to provide any country with access to its secure third-party servers, but Indian government officials indicated the Canadian firm is working on a solution that will likely make use of domestic servers for the messaging services in question.