+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 1st May 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
+to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
+cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
+year. I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
+like today. To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
+needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
+Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
+
+<p>The 2005 numbers are from
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
+the 2012 numbers are from
+<a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
+NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
+email. I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
+and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
+different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
+
+<p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
+quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
+enough. See for example a
+<a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
+on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives. 8 Kbit/s is 60
+Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
+to get the storage requirements.</p>
+
+<p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
+availability requirements etc. But a simple way to calculate can be
+to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
+it to take space, power and redundancy into account. It could be much
+higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
+
+<p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
+calls in Norway? Not much. Here is a small table showing the
+estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
+and large organisations:</p>
+
+<table border="1">
+<tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
+<tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>This is the cost of buying the storage. Maintenance need to be
+taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
+for the reader. But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
+recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
+stopped because it is too expensive. I wonder if someone already is
+collecting the data?</p>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
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