I believe you are right. No way safaricom has the capacity to store the actual contents of calls for is several million subscribers and texts as well. Its an massive amount of data even for a “small” number of subscribers like safaricom has. Meta-data, definitely. My pal’s wife showed him a several pages of logs of calls and texts he used to send his clande when she confronted him.
For this they would have to have been tracking and actively investigating these guys to have the contents of that call.
Messages can be stored. I doubt voice can be stored for that long. Probably a month for voice woild be reasonable, but that computing power for the conversion into storage format is massive. Mimi messages especially with the girl zinaweza nimaliza hapo hapo.
Just some quick calculations:
1 sms of data is 160bytes of data (each character is 1byte). During the 2012/2013 financial year, the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) shows number of sms sent in the country were 4.3billion.
This translates to 688000000000bytes of data which in turn is 5504GB of text data.
Which is only about 5TB of data.
So they are capable of storing all sms data without difficulty, but now imagine trying to store audio data for calls.
They don’t store voice recordings unless the recordings are saved from the phone itself and not the provider. Have you had a look at Google or Facebook data centers? Those stuff are huge and require lots of resources in terms of power and cooling to run. Safaricom and other service providers cannot do that because it will cause a huge dent on their profits. It will be uneconomical to run such and no government can order such to happen because it will drive all providers out of business. Kama infrastructure ya kurun mpesa in kenya ndio waliweka juzi sasa data center ya kusave voice calls wangemanage?
Here is a short read about NSA data centre in Utah…
It is projected to cost $1.5-2 billion. A report suggested that it will cost another $2 billion for hardware, software, and maintenance. The completed facility is expected to require 65
megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. The facility is expected to use 1.7 million gallons (6435 m 3 ) of water per day. www.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Sasa kama hii construction costs plus hardware and software pekee ni $4 billion. Convert to Ksh itakuwa 384 billion. Safaricom pekee is worth 700 billion. Its said that its as huge as the next 4 companies in kenya. Unataka safaricom watumie half of their worth to create a data center to record our voice calls halafu calls zikuwe 30bob per minute? Na sasa kina Orange watachukua loan ili waunde such?
You obviously can’t compare the size of Google datacenter to Safaricom’s. They are worlds apart. But I have realized it’s almost impossible.
From my basic datacomms course, I know voice is at 11kbps. Lossless compression can be achieved by sampling the same at 6kbps. Now lets do the maths:
As one of the 15million safaricom subscribers, I spend approx 100bob on phone calls, translating to 25 minutes of talk time. From my maths, safaricom would need 9mbs for me daily. For the 15,000,000 subscribers, that’s 135Tbs per day.
Safaricom uses Oracle Exadata servers for their storage. A full rack has 14 storages, each approx 100Tb, meaning their capacity is just sufficient for 10 day’s recording.
I imagine the guy wants to vie in 2 yrs time. First thing, he should drop that line, and officially de-register it at Safaricom. Na atupe simu pia.
Second, he gets a new identity. Eg, if he is Bifwoli Wakoli, he can become Bifwori Wakori. He should get a new ID/passport under the new identity.
Then, he can buy a new phone and line, and never use it to MPesa or solicit for illicit sex. Or even to access KTalk. A Nokia 3310 would be best.
In case any of his challengers present anything later, he can always say it is not him.
:):):)
