blog/data/2019-11-25-telefonsamtalelagring.txt

   1 Title: What would it cost to store all 2018 phone calls in Norway?
   2 Tags: english, personvern, surveillance
   3 Date: 2019-11-25 20:15
   4
   5 <p>Four years ago, I did a back of the envelope calculation on
   6 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">how
   7 much it would cost to store audio recordings of all the phone calls in
   8 Norway</a>, and came up with NOK 2.1 million / EUR 250 000 for the
   9 year 2013.  It is time to repeat the calculation using updated
  10 numbers.  The calculation is based on how much data storage is needed
  11 for each minute of audio, how many minutes all the calls in Norway
  12 sums up to, multiplied by the cost of data storage.</p>
  13
  14 <p>The number of phone call minutes for 2018 was fetched from
  15 <a href="https://ekomstatistikken.nkom.no/">the NKOM statistics
  16 site</a>, and for 2018, land line calls are listed as 434 238 000
  17 minutes, while mobile phone calls are listed with 7 542 006 000
  18 minutes.  The total number of minutes is thus 7 976 244 000.  For
  19 simplicity, I decided to ignore any advantages in audio compression the
  20 last four years, and continue to assume 60 Kbytes/min as the last
  21 time.</p>
  22
  23 <p>Storage prices still varies a lot, but as last time, I decide to
  24 take a reasonable big and cheap hard drive, and double its price to
  25 include the surrounding costs into account.  A 10 TB disk cost less
  26 than 4500 NOK / 450 EUR these days, and doubling it give 9000 NOK per
  27 10 TB.</p>
  28
  29 <p>So, with the parameters in place, lets update the old table
  30 estimating cost for calls in a given year:</p>
  31
  32 <table border="1">
  33 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
  34 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">1 170 000 / 117 000</td></tr>
  35
  36 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">900 000 / 90 000</td></tr>
  37
  38 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">855 000 / 85 500</td></tr>
  39
  40 <tr><td>2018</td><td align="right">7 976 244 000</td><td align="right">445 TiB</td><td align="right">401 100 / 40 110</td></tr>
  41 </table>
  42
  43 <p>Both the cost of storage and the number of phone call minutes have
  44 dropped since the last time, bringing the cost down to a level where I
  45 guess even small organizations can afford to store the audio recording
  46 from every phone call taken in a year in Norway.  Of course, this is
  47 just the cost of buying the storage equipment.  Maintenance, need to
  48 be included as well, but the volume of a single year is about a single
  49 rack of hard drives, so it is not much more than I could fit in my own
  50 home.  Wonder how much the electricity bill would raise if I had that
  51 kind of storage?  I doubt it would be more than a few tens of thousand
  52 NOK per year.</p>