[VoiceOps] CALEA for the small fry operator

[Carlos Alvarez]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Nathan Anderson <nathana at fsr.com> wrote:

> Confession time: we did not purchase a commercial softswitch product.  We
> built our own solution on top of Asterisk.  (I can already hear the groans
> and feel the tangible disapproval.)


Why?  There are others on this list who run an Asterisk-based service.


>  We went this route for cost reasons, yes, but more importantly we did it
> because with a custom-engineered solution, we were able to seamlessly
> integrate our new voice offering with our other existing products when it
> comes to both provisioning and billing, and this (I believe) leads to a
> better and more uniform experience for our customers.


Someone we work with calls Asterisk "crack."  You think you should get off
of it, but every time you try something different it has various
limitations that drive you back.  Our view is that Asterisk flexibility
lets us do interesting things that other providers can't do with their high
end commercial products, and we have customers who are with us specifically
because they had a request that others said "can't" be done.  It also lets
us build a crazy amount of physical redundancy for very little cost.


> Sure, I could easily come up with something that would allow for live or
> recorded call interception and/or delivery of CDR/CPNI to law enforcement
> using existing tools already available to me.  What is unclear to me,
> though, is whether there is any particular format or delivery mechanism for
> this data that the law stipulates we follow.  I know that there is an ANSI
> standard, T1.678v2 (and the subsequent supplements), but of course I have
> no access to that (200+ page) document without paying the publisher
> hundreds of dollars for a copy.  And even if we got our hands on a copy, it
> sounds like it would be prohibitively difficult to implement by ourselves.
>

I am not a lawyer and our last legal advice on this is old.  The advice at
the time was that CALEA doesn't apply to us, and it sounds like your
company is just like ours.  A small hosted PBX provider, not a CLEC,
dependent on CLECs for interconnection.  We wrote a compliance document
anyway that states that, and states that we will still provide a best
effort in responding to law enforcement requests that are valid.  It says
that we will provide call bridging and recording capabilities using
standard interfaces, and CDRs using standard file formats.

So far we've only had two LE requests in our history, both for records, and
both were satisfied to get a standard CDR file in CSV format.

-- 
Carlos Alvarez
TelEvolve
602-889-3003
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