Aswath Weblog

Vonage signs up for CALEA to its detriment?

Andy points to a press release from Verisign and Vonage that announces that Vonage has signed up Verisign’s NetDiscovery service. If you already do not know about NetDiscovery, it simplifies the backend operations – interfacing to the Law Enforcement Authorities (LEAs) to receive subpoenas, delivering intercepted information to them and the like. These are all very complicated and there are many rules and regulations. In that respect, this service from Verisign is very advantageous to service providers like Vonage. But that is only half the story.

The other half is the effort involved in collecting the call control information and call content information. Even in here, Vonage will not have any difficulty in collecting the call control information, because they process this as part of a normal call setup. But collecting the call content information is another matter altogether. If the targeted call is transitioning to PSTN, then the Gateway is a natural intercept point. But if the Gateway is provided by a third party, then Vonage has to introduce the intercept point. If the call is end-to-end IP the problem increases many fold. In this case, there is no natural intercept point. This means one intercept point has to be introduced. Since one of the CALEA requirements is that interception should be imperceptible and the user can easily detect that an intercept point has been introduced, the service provider must use the intercept point for all calls – whether they are targeted or not. It is not just the capex has increased for the service provider; the media traffic has to be brought into the service provider’s network and then carried out. In other words, Vonage can not claim, they do not have any network infrastructure.

The other important implication is that with the introduction of the intercept point for all calls and taken together with the SIP Proxy, VoIP service provider has recreated Class 5 switch and has truly and irrefutably gone back to the “intelligent network”.

This analysis applies only to non-facilities based service providers. For DSL and cable modem providers, DSLAM and CMTS are natural intercept points, without impacting the capex and opex expenditures. So if the CALEA requirement is extended to end-to-end IP calls as well, facilities based providers will have an advantage. This issue must be taken into account by the lawmakers and an appropriate solution must be developed. One possibility is for the LEA to coordinate the services of VOIP service provider and the access provider.