CALEA Veteran Offers Hosted Service

Aqsacom has been helping telcos handle CALEA since 1994. Now, through a joint venture, it can help you too.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 11, 2007]

Aqsacom was founded in France and has grown into a worldwide business. The company's U.S. offices are in New York City and Washington, D.C.

It's accustomed to serving large customers. "Our bread and butter is the sale of systems," explains Ben Epstein, Aqsacom's Chief Strategy Officer. Those systems start at around $70,000 and can run over $1,000,000 for a large telco. "We install everything, soup to nuts. Beyond the installation, we hand the solution to the customer and help maintain it."

Now, the company is facilitating an offering called CALEAExpress through a partnership called CALEAusa with an entity it claims is called Swenson and Associates, LLC (visible on the internet as Internet Colorado, LLC).

The goal of the joint venture, Epstein says, is to offer service that smaller companies can afford.

Pricing ranges from $150 per month to $1,000 per month, depending on the site and complexity of the network. There is also a setup fee that starts at $1,000 and depends on the amount of customization required. Standard intercepts are included in the fee.

Although anything requiring additional equipment and staffing will cost more—generally that means that if the customer gets one of the rare content subpoenas requiring real time delivery of voice and data traffic, they will have to pay more—most ISPs that receive subpoenas will only be asked for billing records—sign on, sign off, address of traffic to x, address of traffic from y.

The CALEAusa service, Epstein says, is not quite a TTP and not quite a piece of equipment. The processing is handled by the Aqsacom system. The ISP runs the equipment on its own network. The system delivers the benefits of a hosted service as many small ISPs can pay for the kind of CALEA software that usually only telcos can afford.

That still doesn't mean it's easy.

One problem scenario is called "hairpinning." It's cheapest to deploy surveillance at the core of the network, but if a subscriber talks to another subscriber connected to same AP or DSLAM, that traffic might not go through the core of the network. In such a case, the ISP might need to deploy a probe or software at the edge of the network, which could cost money.

"Some of our customers have started with a simple solution but then added probes all over the place," admits Epstein.

Experience matters
Epstein warns that experienced companies can handle this better than newcomers. "Our European operation is oriented to ETSI and in Europe, we find that each country does it in a slightly different way," he says. "It's not plug and play."

In the U.S., he expects few ISPs to get fined in the early stages, when law enforcement understands that CALEA concepts are still new to the IP industry. "The ISP will only be fined if they're completely unprepared," he says. "Of course, if somebody gets hurt, then lawyers could get involved."

Three years from now, Epstein expects the government to be less understanding.

He says some makers of bandwidth management technology feel they are well-placed for CALEA, but they may not be able to handle large amounts of traffic. Also they may not record failed calls or requests for websites that do not exists. "They don't know the 'gotchas' like we do," says Epstein.

The future
The future, Esptein says, is in the area of data retention. In Europe, legacy voice providers will be required to keep records of all traffic starting in September of 2007, and ISPs and VoIP providers will be required to do the same 18 months later. The storage and retrieval requirements will be massive. The potential business dwarfs that of the lawful intercept business. Data retention, he says, is the future.

— End