Verizon struggles with BlackBerry data traffic

Some Verizon Wireless customers using BlackBerrys have been limited to making voice calls on Research In Motion's smartphone for as long as a week, but Verizon said on Wednesday the issue was fully resolved.

Contributors to a BlackBerry support forum said they had trouble connecting to the Internet, using Internet-based apps and had delayed email delivery since last Tuesday.

RIM routes BlackBerry data traffic through its own servers via a carrier's network, a method not replicated by other smartphones. The company said its service has been operating normally.

"There is no outage, and there hasn't been one," said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson. "Our engineers discovered that a small number of customers in a limited geographic area had technical glitches that resulted in their email being delayed up to an hour," he said.

The Verizon glitch was fully resolved on Tuesday night, he said, declining to provide further technical details or say how many customers were affected or where they were located.

The issue was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, which said many of those reporting problems were from California.

Verizon expects much of its 2011 growth to come from a rising number of smartphone customers.

The top U.S. wireless operator, a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone, is set to begin selling Apple's iPhone in February, ending rival AT&T's three-and-a-half year lock on the device in the United States.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; editing by Rob Wilson)