(only 6 months for IP based communications) for the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of terrorism and organized crime.
The data retention directive defines the data required to be kept to:
- trace and identify the source and destination of a communication,
- identify the date, time and duration of a communication, and
- identify the type of communication, location and type of communication device The content of the communications will not be recorded. I counted over 44 data points to be stored based on the type of communication network used!
The European Union countries will now have until August 2007 to implement the directive, and according to the legislative text: "it is appropriate to foresee that Member States reimburse demonstrated additional costs incurred in order to comply with the obligations imposed on them as a consequence of this Directive". Still the new directive will have a deep impact on the European communications industry. As an example, since text messages are delivered via the SS7 network, data should be retained for one year. Over 100 billion text messages were exchanged in the EU last year, even with a minimal 1 KB of data for each (hopefully we'll learn from Y2K here), it's a new 100 TB of data to be stored. How many emails and VoIP calls will the 230M internet users in the European Union send every 6 months is certainly in the same order of magnitude as are fixed and mobile phone calls (terminated or not). In total, it's probably several Petabytes of new storage to be deployed in the carriers' infrastructure.
Today, over 1/3 of the world's data is archived on Sun storage tape library equipment thanks to our recent acquisition of StorageTek, and Sun can help reduce the strain on the carriers' staff, budget... and sanity. The upcoming IMS infrastructure will improve the management of subscriber data across all applications and networks, and reduce the need to develop usage collection in multiple silos.
Communications service providers can also use the new stringent data retention rules and turn them into a competitive weapon rather than another cost center. By collecting usage data from multiple applications and networks in a single place, carriers can unlock vital business intelligence on how their subscribers are using their networks. This directive represents an
opportunity to re-think revenue assurance and seriously address revenue leakage and fraud management across all networks.
