Fergie's Tech Blog

Corporations Could Start Archiving Phone Calls?

Olag Kharif writes in Businesweek's "The Tech Beat":

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.

posted by Fergie @ 5/17/2006 06:49:00 AM