Internet providers have said they won't be able to implement controversial systems to capture UK browsing data until 2018, with BT suggesting the Home Office should cover "100 percent" of the costs.

Bosses from BT, Virgin Media, and Sky told a joint committee of MPs and Lords that it would be difficult for them to comply with sweeping plans to collect records of online activity proposed under new surveillance laws. "This bill potentially could look at all of us having to almost mirror our entire network's traffic to then be able to filter it, that's a huge, huge undertaking," said Hugh Woolford, director of operations at Virgin Media.



"We've put some thought into the timescales. We feel that we could probably, as long as the discussions and detail are worked through, we could start 2017 with earliest deployment in 2018, depending on the scale of the request," he continued.


The draft Investigatory Powers Bill, which was published by the Home Office in November, will require communications companies to store details of websites accessed by everyone in the UK for 12 months.

Under the law companies would have to keep information on who visited what domain, but not the individual pages they went to. This data would show that someone had visited WIRED.co.uk, for example, but not that they then read this news story. It is expected that the bill will be passed into law next year after it has been scrutinised by officials and voted on by MPs.

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However, all three of the UK's major internet providers said the proposed law wasn't clear in the exact requirements it would place upon their services and needed to be clarified as it passed through the House of Commons and House of Lords. Adam Kinsley, director of policy and public affairs at Sky, said the proposed law would force companies to capture a "magnitude of data" about their customers.

The ISPs said it would be possible to collect this information, called Internet Connection Records (ICRs) by the draft law, but added that it would be challenging as it had never been captured before.

Mark Hughes, president of BT Security, told the cross-party group of officials that to be able to capture and retain the data of internet users would be "costly".


Hughes said the funding being proposed by the Home Office to implement the technology would not be enough to roll-out the ability to capture internet records. The Home Office has budgeted approximately £175 million to help internet service providers and communications companies implement the technology needed to collect the masses of web data from users.

Hughes saidthis figure would not be enough for all of the providers to be able to have their costs covered, adding that BT believed "100 percent" of its costs should be reimbursed. "We've worked out for us alone, and I can't comment for others around the table or others in the industry, to fulfil the assumptions that we have been given will cost us tens of millions, so the lions share of that £174 million would be for us alone," Hughes said.

It has previously been stated by Internet Service Providers’ Association, the umbrella group for internet service providers, that broadband bills would increase if ISPs were forced to cover the cost of capturing internet data.