"Our BeaconWorks implementation has helped make Metro Court a shining example of what the future will look like for courthouses around the country," said Paul Roybal, chief information officer of the Bernanillo County Metropolitan Court. "Not only have we found a way to strongly mitigate America's frustration with lost productivity associated with the wait to be selected for jury duty, but we've enhanced the building's security and increased the effectiveness of judges, lawyers and visitors inside the building as well."
The Metro Court is New Mexico's busiest court, and hosts 16 judges and hundreds of jurors daily. Although the court originally installed a wired network, it still faced three problems that led the court to switch to a wireless network.
As with most courts around the country, prospective jurors lost productive work time as they waited to see if they would be selected to serve on a jury. In the past, many citizens had complained that this time away from work was a heavy burden. Metro Court's new system implementation gives prospective jurors the ability to work remotely on laptops and handhelds inside the courthouse, while they wait.
In addition, with cellular phones are prohibited inside the building, Metro Court's security force relied instead on proprietary 900 MHz wireless phones for vital communications. Unfortunately, the large amount of concrete and steel in the building created interference that resulted in a large number of dropped calls on these phones. Due to the tight security required by the presence of criminals and highly emotional events inside the building, dropped calls by the security force was an intolerable security risk.
The Metro Court overcame this challenge by purchasing wireless telephones. These wireless phones run directly over BeaconWorks' Internet Protocol, so security personnel, and visiting security personnel (such as local sheriffs) who rely on phones for communications, can use voice-over fidelity (Vo-Fi) phones without the risk of dropped calls.
With the growth of Internet and online communications, Web connectivity has become important to lawyers' ability to serve the needs of their clients, and judges' ability to conduct research. However, without dedicated offices inside the courthouse, these parties lacked convenient, available Internet access. The new system provides them with highly available Internet access to help ensure they are most effective at their jobs.
The Metro Court had the following requirements for the WLAN:
- To reduce management and maintenance costs using centralized management of the system, rather than at each of the access points throughout the building;
- Highly secure and reliable authentication of everyone using the system, regardless of the operating system they were using;
- Prioritization of traffic, so that the voice traffic of security personnel using wireless phones, for example, would be prioritized over prospective jurors' Internet traffic;
- Integration with (and investment protection for) the court's investment in its existing network infrastructure.