Friday February 16, 2007

Especially for the european market Sun and Comptel Corporation, a leading Operations Support System (OSS) software vendor for convergent mediation, charging, provisioning and network inventory, announced this week at 3GSM that we'll jointly provide a turn-key Data Retention Solution to mobile and fixed telecom operators worldwide for data retention of voice call and Internet traffic related data. The Data Retention Solution is designed to fully support the requirements of the European Union (EU) Data Retention Directive (EDRD), including phase two, which covers the retention of data from IP and data networks. According to the EDRD, mobile and fixed operators in all 27 EU member countries should have a data retention solution in place by September 15, 2007.

EDRD, which the EU issued in March 2006, mandates the retention of voice call and Internet traffic related data in all 27 member countries, to be used in cases of serious crimes, including terrorism. The directive includes the retention of data from mobile phones, Internet and fixed telephony, Internet access and e-mail. Any affected party needs to retain essential information about these communications. According to the directive, data must be retained for a period of time between six months and two years, but some member states have chosen to extend that period to up to five years.

The Directive requires Member States to ensure that communications providers must retain necessary data as specified in the Directive:

1. to trace and identify the source of a communication;
   
2. to trace and identify the destination of a communication;
   
3. to identify the date, time and duration of a communication;
   
4. to identify the type of communication;
   
5. to identify the communication device;
   
6. to identify the location of mobile communication equipment.

"This EU directive is very problematic and costly to implement from an operator's point of view. Consider for example the wide variety of sources of data, and volumes involved. This is why Comptel's expertise in telecom data collection, and Sun's hardware and software expertise are the perfect combination to solve this problem quickly and cost-effectively for operators," says Markku Penttinen, EVP of Convergent Mediation for Comptel Corporation.

Comptel's field-proven and market-leading mediation software is used to collect and process the call data from the various networks. Comptel's software runs on Sun Fire servers, running the Solaris 10 OS, the most advanced OS on the planet. The data itself is stored to a low-cost database, which removes the need for any expensive 3rd party licenses. The stored data is compressed automatically using the Solaris ZFS file system. Sun StorageTek storage systems take care of the physical storing of the data during the retention years. Comptel's state-of-the-art software has off-the-shelf features covering auditing, user profiles and other security requirements for the comprehensive data retention solution.

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