An incomplete PQ answer

[Richard Clayton]

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In article <2DA38795-0604-466B-B47D-D5B7C47D0515@batten.eu.org>, Ian
Batten <igb@batten.eu.org> writes

>>        2007            10          5,714,045     2,632,450
>
>So each grant is of the order of 700 grand.

In 2004 each grant was of the order of 16K...   so what you're seeing is
MUCH larger entities obtaining money for data retention.

Note that this is in the run up to the time when the mobile companies
and telcos had to move to retaining data for a year;  whereas one might
suspect that 2004 was all about tiny little ISPs ...

...  since I have no inside information :) I can speculate along with
everyone else :)

>   It depends on if the  
>grants are capex one-off, capex on a depreciation basis or capex+opex,  

capex one-off I believe -- again speaking from informed ignorance :) ...

I believe that the opex is supposed to be covered by the "per request"
that the authorities pay for making their 500K requests/annum.

>but for half a million quid a year over three years you could buy and  
>operate a substantial fraction of a petabyte of disk in a MAID arrays,  
>and a few hundred terabytes of conventional RAID (the power would get  
>you).

we're now sending 1.5E9 text messages/week...  if you need to record

        time, date,
        source number,
        destination number,
        geographic location of source and destination
        and the byte-length
        (but not of course the content!)

then that starts to mount up...  and that's before counting phone calls,
both fixed and mobile

<URL:http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2222764/uk-mobile-usage-shows-
text-king>

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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