Archiving Phone Calls? Why Not; It's Cheap
Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 16, 2006
Consultancy Ferris Research recently calculated how much it would cost to archive voice calls — an issue all the more intriguing in light of the government’s phone records controversy. Ferris estimates that storing one hour of voice calls takes up about 5 megabytes. So if a user is on the phone for an hour 200 days a year, that adds up to 1 gigabyte of storage a year. That amount of storage costs between $1.60 and $2.10.
So, in theory, recording calls — either by the government or corporations that want to keep tabs on employee activities — would come at a trivial cost.
As an increasing number of phone calls are being routed via the Web, through Web-calling services, they are becoming easier to record than traditional phone calls, as they are in a digital format. Considering voice archiving’s low cost, I think it’s a real possibility that corporations — and, potentially, the government — could start to record phone calls.
