Please be aware that the current capacity of the telephone system in the United States (and for that matter, most of the developed world) is only capable of supporting between 15 and 20 percent simultaneous telephone conversations. If the FBI wishes to set up a system that is capable of monitoring 1% of the total number of lines, that equates to a ability to tap 5%, not 1% of all calls in progress.
The FBI now says they only want to tap 1% of simultaneous capacity, not 1% of total number of lines. On the other hand, the actual utilization of the telephone network is also much lower than the number of lines - back when I was a voice-telephony geek, our estimates for busy-hour phone utilization were about 1/12 for residential and 1/6 for business (3 and 6 hundred call-seconds per hour); that was before widespread use of fax machines, modems, or LANs, so business utilization has probably increased. Equipped trunk capacity was typically enough to have a maximum of 1% blocking during busy hour, which means a certain amount of margin over average calls in progress, and switch capacity depends radically on technology - some kinds of switches are non-blocking, while others have various capacity limits. "One Bell System - It Works!" #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---