When the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court moved into a new $67 million courthouse in Albuquerque, N.M., in February, it began using a converged Internet Protocol (IP) network for voice, data, video and audio communication. With the new network, the court can hold arraignments and bond hearings by teleconferencing, which saves money and improves security.

New Mexico's busiest court, Metropolitan Court, handles criminal, civil and traffic cases, with approximately 3,000 visitors a day. The courthouse works closely with the Metropolitan Detention Center, located 17 miles away. For many years, inmates were transported between the detention center and courthouse for court-related activities, which occupied staff members' time and created possible security problems.

Metropolitan Court previously had two communications networks to serve approximately 350 users, including lawyers, judges and administrative staff: a fiber-optics-based system for computers, and a time-division multiplexing private branch exchange (PBX) switch to handle phone calls. Maintaining two separate systems was inefficient, time consuming, and costly. To move, add or change phone lines, the court had to call a technician from the PBX's manufacturer, at a cost of thousands of dollars a month. Additionally, the phone system was not designed to support the latest IP-based tools, such as unified messaging, multimedia conferencing and contact center capabilities.

“As we were planning the new facility, we knew we wanted a converged network,” says Paul Roybal, Metropolitan Court's director of information technology. “I felt strongly from the beginning that IP telephony was the best solution. In addition to voice and data, we intended to run video over the network for arraignments, bonding and interviews. To achieve these goals without a converged network would have easily doubled our cable costs, and our ongoing support and management expenses would have been higher, too.”

Metropolitan Court selected a network based on switches, IP telephone systems and firewalls from San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems. Locally based Network Architects installed the network in about six months and provided initial support.

Now an inmate can “appear” before one of the court's 16 judges at a video station for a pretrial arraignment, bond hearing or other judicial matter without physically leaving detention. “The inmate sees both the judge at the bench and the district attorney in the courtroom on a split screen,” Roybal says. “Two video cameras can be controlled locally or remotely to pan, tilt or zoom.”

The network also allows the court to digitally record audio of the proceedings. In the past, a court reporter had to sit in each courtroom to record the proceedings. Now every courtroom is wired for sound, and court proceedings are digitized and transmitted to a central area where clerks can monitor up to four trials at once.

To give judges, attorneys, jurors and security personnel access to the network from anywhere in the building, Metropolitan Court integrated a wireless local area network from Boulder, Colo.-based SpectraLink Corp. with the Cisco equipment. Now everyone in the building, including residents waiting in the courthouse during jury selection, can link their laptops wirelessly to the Internet. “We've found a way to mitigate lost productivity while people wait to be selected for a jury, and we've also increased the effectiveness of judges and lawyers inside the building,” Roybal says.

Roybal estimates that the IP network has saved Metropolitan Court $14,000 per month in recurring telephone expenses alone, compared to the PBX the court had used previously. Roybal and his team anticipate expanding the converged network's capabilities to include security monitoring. Security cameras can be installed at any network connection, and they can be monitored centrally just like any other network device.