Call-SMS records to be available for one year

From now on, the customers will get a detailed record or CDR of their call-SMS for one year. Earlier, this record was only available for two months.

According to BTRC, mobile phone subscribers need call list, SMS details or CDR for various reasons including family, business, personal, legal.

The top level official of the department concerned of BTRC said that earlier the customers get 60-day CDR within seven days of filing application. Now the regulatory body is seeing that consumers need recoreds for more days and many have applied for it. So this period has been extended to one year subject to some conditions with the opinion of the operators.

Conditions for obtaining CDR:

CDR of one year prior to the date of application will be issued.

Operators will give this CDR within seven days of application submission and the customer care will deliver it.

The applicant should be present in person along with proof of biometric verification, NID, own active SIM used in the application.

CDR will contain time, date and range of all incoming, outgoing, calls and SMS.

Statement of mobile phone operators

Grameenphone says that they can give CDR of one year. However, it requires time and investment in developing the technical system. The operator will develop this system in a timely manner if given instructions by the BTRC.

Robi said that some time will be required for the development of this system. They have more than one year of data on live systems and another one year on tape drives. And extracting the data from the tape drive is quite time consuming and it depends on the operational capacity of the server.

Banglalink says that it can provide the CDR but it will require time and investment.

However, this CDR is very important to the law enforcement agencies in identifying crimes and criminals.

Bangladesh Government's e-Government Computer Incident Response Team (BGD e-Gov Cert) says CDR is very important in digital forensics. Getting some crime related information from the criminal's mobile phone has now become a very common thing. Even by analyzing the mobile data of a criminal, other criminals related to that crime are also identified. The use of a special technology behind all this is very important.

If a criminal deletes or formats everything on the mobile device, no more information on the mobile device is available. In this case it is possible to get information from this mobile device by completing high level digital forensics. The only place of trust then is the CDR data, they added.