Storing and examining CDRs (call detail or data records) helps many mobile telecom operators to run their businesses better. They use the data to reconcile billing, help manage their networks and track usage patterns to plan for future capacity needs.
But that data has the potential to do more than just increase business efficiency or grow the bottom line. When it's placed in the right hands at the right time, it can literally save someone's life.
In the United States, the number of subpoenas for call data is doubling
every month. In the United Kingdom, mobile telecom companies receive one
million data requests a year from law enforcement agencies, according
to Ray Green, managing director at
Focus
Data Services, a U.K.-based company that helps mobile telecom companies
respond to such requests. The data helps police investigate and solve
all types of cases, from white-collar crime like accounting fraud to life-threatening,
real-time emergencies such as suicide calls.
In emergencies, the speed with which such information is accessed and
sent to police is critical. But until recently, mobile telecom companies
could not always respond immediately because of the massive amounts of
data and the cost and time of making it always available. Much of the
data might be stored offline, for example, or the data might be inaccessible
in the middle of the night when the company was backing up its systems.
And because of the many mergers and acquisitions in the telecom industry,
some companies now have a hodgepodge of as many as a dozen different back-end
systems, so locating the data could be a problem.
Focus Data Services uses Dataupia technology to solve that problem by allowing mobile telecom companies to quickly process police and emergency service requests for CDRs. The technology enables Focus to consolidate data from many different systems, including tape, into one source effectively and economically, and to make that data available at all times.
With the new system, mobile telecom companies can help law enforcement save more lives and solve more crimes. Police may be able to rescue a kidnapping victim by quickly tracing the location of a call, for example. And as countries have adopted the European Union's Directive on Data Retention, which requires companies to keep such records for a year, it is becoming even more clear how valuable historic telephone data is in criminal investigations. The more data that can be saved and searched, the better chance police have of solving crimes.
Having an inexpensive way to store more CDRs for longer periods of time, while still making them quickly accessible, can produce an impressive return on investment. In business terms, the system reduces the staff and cost required to respond to requests. From a human perspective, however, the return on investment is priceless.
