The Advent of Digital Telephony has Revolutionized Office Communications
The advent of digital telephony has revolutionized office communications. Now, instead of a single office number and extension numbers, each office desk phone could have its own direct dial number.
Now, when somebody calls you, their desk number can be displayed and you know exactly who is calling you.
The Internet used to be like that, you’d know who’s communicating with you because they’d all have their own Internet address.
When this digital telephony really took off, something quite expected happened. The telephone companies ran out of numbers, and then the entire telephone numbering scheme ran out of numbers.
We went form dialing 01 if you’re outside London to 0171 or 0181 and now we have 0207, 0208.
The Internet however cannot just stick extra numbers into Internet addresses; at least, not without changing the way everything works. So instead we have NAT, Network Address Translation. Essentially like having extension numbers, but on the Internet and for your computers, phones, tablets etc. That’s how most people’s homes serve all the devices, TVs, phones, etc., using their single IP address.
But the problem is bigger now. Mobile networks have so many subscribers and devices, and not enough IP addresses for all of them. So like you do in your home, they use NAT, though their NAT routers are not a small home hub in the kitchen, they are huge noisy boxes, so NAT is not for your children’s tablets and your TV but for millions of phones and tablets.
That’s like having a single phone number and extensions for an entire city.
So what’s the problem?
When you only had a single office number and extensions, if somebody made a bomb threat, you’d have no idea who it was, only that it was from that office. Similarly, with this huge use of NAT, if a mobile subscriber posts a threatening social media message, you know it came from that phone network, but no more.
This is where the requirement for IPAR (Internet Protocol Address Resolution) and Internet Connection Records comes from, it simply puts back the information that law enforcement needs to, if they have to, trace communications to their origin.
IPAR is like storing telephone call records, so that you can find out which office phone made that abusive phone call, even if the number was the main office number.
This isn’t invasive, it isn’t a privacy issue. Just like phone records, all the data is protected by law.
I’ve not mentioned the four horsemen of the infopocalypse; terrorists, drug dealers, money launderers or pedophiles. It’s not about that, it’s about finding out day to day policing, finding out who’s child is threatening to hurt themselves, who’s bragging about killing somebody.
Yaana has developed an end to end IPAR and Internet Connection Record Solution that encompasses off-switch data acquisition, IP ingestion & retention, along with query and disclosure management based on twenty years of experience working with Law Enforcement Agencies and Service Providers. Each of these components can be used either separately or together to provide a perfect-fit IPAR system for each Communication Service Provider’s needs.
Yaana’s state of the art data acquisition probes use high performance processors and advanced algorithms to map sessions and provide rich metadata; Ingestion and retention systems receive and process IPs for economic storage and fast retrieval; Intuitive query interfaces provide insights into session bandwidth patterns durations; and Disclosure management provides fast, simple generation of IPAR data for compliance delivery to law enforcement requests.