What would it cost to store all of America's phone calls?

Cory Doctorow 5:54 pm Sun Jun 16, 2013

The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle has done the math on building a data-center that could hold all of America's voice-calls, and concluded that this it wouldn't quite fit within the $20M price-tag reported for Prism, though it's not far off.

These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and process all US phonecalls made in a year. The NSA seems to be spending $1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more. Therefore, money and technology would not hold back such a project– it would be held back if someone did not have the opportunity or will.

Another study concluded about 4x my data estimates others have suggested the data could be compressed 10:1, and the power bill would be lower in Utah.

Here's a shared spreadsheet with Kahle's calculations.

Cost to Store All US Phonecalls Made in a Year in Cloud Storage so it could be Datamined

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