Support Systems: Beyond CALEA

New Tracking Tools Also Support E-Mail, Chat

ACE*COMM Corp. recently unveiled some new tools to help service providers comply with new CALEA rules, but in doing so the company went a step further to also support e-mail and other Internet communications.

"Our product also supports Web mail and chat rooms and Web traffic and so on," says Martin Demers, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at ACE*COMM. "It can track any kind of traffic. We believe in the next few years this [kind of communication] will become part of CALEA."

CALEA stands for the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

The FCC's 1994 CALEA mandate, recently moved along by passage of the USA Patriot Act, requires telecom service providers to support the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct lawfully authorized electronic sur-veillance of call content and call data.

The new ACE*COMM product is called Call Intercept Manager (CIM). The voice/data monitoring system collects and analyzes suspicious and high-risk information.

The CIM can collect both Interception Related Information (IRI) and Call Content (CC) in real-time. When combined with ACE*COMM's Convergent Mediation technology, CIM can filter calls by any IRI field, including session classification (voice, fax, or data). It also monitors DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) activity, allowing for the monitoring of calling card, call back, and voicemail sessions.

The product can be target-centric, based on particular addresses or phone numbers, or data centric, which would relate to certain archived messages or real-time communications.

The company also recently has enhanced its NetPlus EOSS (Enterprise Operations Support System). The new NetPlus Internet Content Manager (ICM) supports both the target-centric and data-centric monitoring of subscriber IP traffic. It further enables the tracking of content by type and amount, and can monitor several IP segments (LAN/WAN) simultaneously.

In other company news, ACE*COMM is also looking into opportunities created by the breakup of large telcos into smaller telcos in places like China. According to Demers, this will increase the opportunity to measure traffic at the edge of networks to do invoice recon-ciliation.

ACE*COMM's core product, N*VISION, collects usage information for OSS applications such as subscriber billing, fraud management, wholesaler/reseller billing, settlement, CABS, and data warehousing. It also performs data validation, normalization, augmentation, and statistical analysis.

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