The Intelligence Bureau (IB) wants all mobile phone companies to store call data records, or details of all phone calls made by their customers, for a period of five years -a move that is set to be vehemently opposed by companies citing operational costs. At present, telcos store call records only for six months.

The intelligence agency had earlier asked the telecom department to mandate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to keep a record of all online activities of customers for a minimum of six months.

But so far this has not be implemented due to a slew of concerns, ranging from increased costs to the fact that storage of these details for a long time could pose privacy threat.

The home ministry, in a communication to the telecom ministry, acknowledged that so far all efforts to get telcos save call records for more than one year had met with stiff resistance due to the increased costs.

But, the communication adds the sector regulator Trai, which plans to analyse the call records for calculating the liability of telcos, would be looking at call records between November 2005 and

March 2009, indicating that such details were available with all mobile phone companies. "Therefore there should be no problem for service providers to preserve their call data records for five years and make it available to law enforcement agencies when required," the home ministry communication by its joint director PS Purohit added.

An executive with a telecom company said that the IB demands cannot be enacted without changes to the rules that were introduced in 2007 when the foreign holdings in mobile phone companies were enhanced to 74%.

The DoT official said that the IB''s demands were being examined while adding that the no decision had been taken on this issue.

The official also added that the DoT may ask the inter-ministerial group currently looking into monitoring of both internet services and networks in the country must take a final call on this issue.

Last month, the telecom department turned down a demand by intelligence agencies that all operators upgrade their infrastructure to tap the phones of at least 1% of their customers.

This would have resulted in companies like Bharti Airtel , Vodafone Essar , Reliance Communications and BSNL enhancing their infrastructure to tap one over million phones each as all of them have over 100 million customers. Currently, large telcos are mandated to have requisite infrastructure in place to tap 1,000 phones simultaneously.

Under the existing framework, only about 15,000 phones can be tapped simultaneously across the country.

With over 800 million mobile connections, implementing this IB plan would have required all operators to jointly create infrastructure to tap 8 million phones. According to industry estimates, all operators combined will have to invest anywhere between $500 million to $1billion, including servers and storage costs, to build capabilities to tap 8 million phones simultaneously.

The IB has off late has been seeking a series of steps from the telecom department to enhance security.

It also wants the telecom and IT departments to work with mobile phone companies and the National Informatics Centre to put in place a system that can uniquely identify any person using the internet across the country. The project aims to develop a technology platform where users will have to mandatorily submit some form of an online identification.