A phone call can be compressed to 10 kbits/sec or less given a good speech codec and still be understandable, if not of very good quality. That means that if you are on the phone 20 minutes every day, it will be around a half a GB per year.
If every American is on phone that much, it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks. That is a bit, but the datacenter in Utah presumably have a capacity of a yottabyte, or nearly seven order of magnitude more than what is needed to record all phonecalls for a given year. They would have capacity to store all phone calls for nearly a million years if the yottabyte figure is right.
The "yottabyte" estimate is absurd, but individual scientific computing centers have about half an exabyte of storage, so the NSA wouldn't have the slightest trouble storing a few exabytes (some GBs per person per year).
In contrast, total IP traffic is in the tens of exabytes per month [1], but much of it is re-transmission of content such as movies, that the NSA is not interested in storing. I wonder what sort of steganography detection they have in place.
> it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks
4TB harddisks you mean ... But why stop at Americans? It's obviously feasible to record all phone calls made anywhere in the world, forever. Hooking into large network operators won't be such a big problem either.
If every American is on phone that much, it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks. That is a bit, but the datacenter in Utah presumably have a capacity of a yottabyte, or nearly seven order of magnitude more than what is needed to record all phonecalls for a given year. They would have capacity to store all phone calls for nearly a million years if the yottabyte figure is right.