Wavelink Helps Maintain Security and Control Costs at One of Florida´s Largest Jails

Pinellas County deploys Wavelink software to manage a wireless voice and data network across a 48 acre facility

With an average daily population of over 3000 inmates, the Pinellas County Jail is one of Florida´s largest jails, tasked with holding everyone from the convicted shop-lifter serving a short sentence to the accused murderer awaiting trial and possible life imprisonment.

To keep track of all the inmates, the Pinellas County Sheriff has installed a new Jail Inmate Management System (JIMS) built around a wireless local area network (WLAN) and handheld computing devices (PDAs) carried by jail deputies. The new system -installed by Unisys - relies on Wavelink software to manage the WiFi (802.11b) network.

TRACKING INMATES

"Anyone arrested in Pinellas County - regardless of the law enforcement agency - is brought here," says Lieutenant Jim Main of the Pinellas County Sheriff´s Office. "We have a lot of reporting requirements. The court system may ask us to show how many times a client had access to the law library, or the recreation yard, or the medical clinic. It is extremely time-consuming for us to go back through handwritten logs to extract that information. The new Jail Inmate Management System will eliminate a lot of that paperwork. We print a barcode ID-card for each inmate, then we can scan the barcode to check the inmate in or out of certain areas in the jail."

Deputies will use PDAs equipped with barcode scanners for everything from documenting physical checks of inmates to logging them in and out of different locations in the twelve building facility. With the wireless network, individual transactions will immediately update the Jail Inmate Management System so the most up-to-date information is available on the network for the jail staff. The system is integrated with a database of inmate photos that allows deputies to confirm the identity of prisoners in real-time from anywhere in the facility.

NETWORK MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE

"When I was first assigned to this project, I had no way of managing all this," says Tom Baumgartner, Network Analyst for the Pinellas County Sheriff. "Before we discovered Wavelink Mobile Manager, I thought we´d need three to four additional personnel just to manage the wireless network for the jail since we are a twenty-four-hour operation. I have over 100 PDAs coming online. Right now we have about 60 Access Points (APs), and I can see us bumping that up over a hundred in the next year. So from a taxpayer´s point of view you can see how much Mobile Manager saves us in terms of salaries alone."

Lieutenant Main agrees, "The Wavelink solution makes it more cost effective and efficient to monitor all our access points and all the mobile devices that are on our wireless network."

Wavelink Mobile Manager and Avalanche provide central management and control for wireless access points and mobile devices. "There´s a whole host of things that we can now deal with - from entering MAC addresses for authentication of the PDAs, to broadcasting updates to all the APs at once as opposed to having to go to each AP one at a time," says Lieutenant Main. "You can´t beat the ability to look at a high level overview of your wireless network to insure that everything is up and running properly."

GREATER VISIBILITY

"Right now, we have over100 Symbol PPT 2846 PDAs," says Baumgartner. "We´re going to integrate Wavelink Avalanche software so I can see these PDAs out there. If I have to do software revisions, I can send them out to the devices over the air."

In addition to the Symbol PDAs, the jail currently has Symbol 4131 access points and will be adding Cisco 1200 series access points in a new $30 million medical facility currently under construction. Baumgartner especially appreciates the ability of the Wavelink software to accommodate the jail´s multi-vendor network environment.

We also have 25 Cisco switches for the wireless network," he says. "If I have a problem with a switch, Wavelink Mobile Manager allows me to query that switch just like an access point. When an AP goes down, I get an alert on my Mobile Manager console. So I can actually monitor my wireless switches as well as my access points."

For mapping the wireless infrastructure, Baumgartner has been able to integrate other high-end radio frequency technology with the Wavelink network management software. "I used a Fluke OptiView network analyzer to do our site survey and troubleshooting. I´ll be able to import data from that device directly into Mobile Manager. That will be a huge time saver."

The latest version of the Wavelink Mobile Manager includes the ability to understand the health and performance of the network including which access points have the most mobile devices connecting, helping to understand load and traffic on the network. "I can see the actual MAC addresses of those mobile devices as they roam from one AP to another," says Baumgartner. "I can monitor network traffic flow."

WIRELESS SECURITY

The Sheriff´s Office originally decided to install the wireless network to control both costs and security. "We could have spent a lot of money to put wired jacks in places where we didn´t have them, or we could go wireless. From a cost standpoint, wireless was a no-brainer. It´s cheaper, more convenient, and gives us a lot more flexibility," says Lieutenant Main. "To add wires in a jail - especially in areas that are accessible to inmates, you have to go overboard with protection using full conduits that are highly secure. We´ve been able to locate ninety percent of our access points (APs) completely out of reach."

Locating the APs out of reach may be more secure for the jail staff, but it creates a maintenance challenge for network administrators. "If I had to reconfigure those 60 access points manually, it would have been a nightmare. It´s not like you can just walk to each location. There are security gates everywhere. It would have taken months," says Baumgartner. "With Mobile Manager, I can reconfigure any number of access points overnight from the central console."

"Our big concern is security," Baumgartner continues. "We don´t want just anybody getting on our system, so encryption is very important for us. We´ll use Wavelink Mobile Manager to rotate WEP keys frequently, and we´re adding fixed firewalls in between network systems. Regardless of the security methods we employ, we have to be able to manage all our access points."

ADDING VOICE OVER WLAN

The extensive new wireless infrastructure in the jail has created the opportunity to resolve another nagging communication problem for the Pinellas County Jail.

"In a jail there´s a lot of concrete and steel that tends to interfere with cellular phones," explains Lieutenant Main. "We have emergencies where we need to be on the phone from within an inmate´s cell, but we don´t have phone lines in the cells and no cellular phone reception there."

"Voice-over-IP phones on our wireless LAN will give us additional coverage and backup communications for our existing radio system," says Lieutenant Main. "Our radio frequencies are severely limited. We have more radio traffic than we have channel capacity. We´re hoping we´ll be able to move some of our radio traffic off the traditional UHF frequencies and maybe do all our jail communications over the 802.11 wireless LAN."

So Baumgartner is also launching a Voice over Wireless LAN pilot project at the jail with ten new Cisco 7920 VoIP phones.

"In setting up the Voice-over-IP phones, I learned how easy it was to establish different profiles for the different access points using Wavleink Mobile Manager," says Baumgartner. "Wavelink´s tech support has been fantastic and saved me a lot of time. When we initiated the Voice-over-IP project we had to trunk our links. It could have been a nightmare to rip our system apart to accommodate voice, but with Mobile Manager I could just add a new profile to add an extra VLAN and trunk it. Essentially we will have two separate networks - one for data and one for voice. That saved lots of time and money."

WIRELESS LAPTOPS FOR A NEW MEDICAL CLINIC AND PATROL CARS

Soon a new $30 million, four-story medical facility will centralize the jail´s health care resources. The Sheriff plans to equip the medical staff with mobile laptops to speed and simplify medical record keeping for the inmate population.

"The Jail Inmate Management System includes an electronic medical records application. Right now we must maintain traditional paper charts on 50,000 inmates a year," says Lieutenant Main. "That will all become electronic."

"When the new medical facility is equipped with wireless APs, Wavelink Mobile Manager will make it easier to bring them online by automatically discovering and configuring each one," says Baumgartner who also foresees new applications for Wifi outside the county jail.

"We´d like to put WiFi hot spots throughout the county for the Sheriff´s Deputies´ laptops," Baumgartner explains. "We have about 600 patrol cars. These cars will be able upload information to the network at each hotspot."

He anticipates installing Wavelink Mobile Manager at the Sheriff´s Administration building as well to accommodate that separate functionality. "Centralized management is the key," he says. "It comes down to deputy safety. They´re going to rely on this. Wavelink software allows us to keep the network up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year."