I’m the CEO of a small VoIP company that has just expanded into wireless broadband.
We are fully CALEA compliant for our VoIP services and expect to be compliant for our broadband services shortly. Since we have a 24/7 NOC center, proper LEO requests can be complied with quickly. This is a major cost for our company and due to the competitive environment we absorb the cost out of profitability rather than pass through to the customer.
IMHO, the FCC is out of control on this and many other issues.
I run a small wireless ISP, and I have NO NOC of any kind. I outsource my web and mail services, and I don’t even have an office. I carry my information around on this laptop I post from and my cell phone is my business number.
We have about 80-90 customers (haven’t asked bookkeeping for the exact number lately), and no debt, but we put our network up 2 years and 9 months ago, and I have yet to collect a paycheck. This is purely a bootstrap business, where we use sales and a lot of annual subscriptions (quite discounted) to provide cash flow to pay bills and fund CPE. No way can I pay for a TTP, or even to hire an answering service 24/7. I have yet to file any of the CALEA paperwork, because I am absolutely at a loss as to what to say. This is my dream of 8 years, and we’re finally making headway and see light at the end of the long dark startup tunnel of a bazillion hours of free labor and self education.
My equipment is purely RF. Nowhere except at my bandwith provider’s is there any point where my traffic hits any physical medium. Even the AP’s and backhauls are totally integrated devices, using a closed linux based OS.
To sum it up, without totally re-thinking and physically re-building my network, I have no mechanism by which to comply with CALEA. I cannot tap the access points, backhauls, OR the CPE. None of it has intercept or mirroring, or any other capability.
I have 5 years of actual work (twho years of college and then network deployment and so on) into this. If you think I will abandon this without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken.