Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

September 12, 2010

Ask any prison security guard and they will tell you that the biggest issue in jails and federal prisons today are contraband mobile phones. And the problem has been ongoing for many years now. But prisons' attempts in blocking mobile phone utilization by cell mates has been a very controversial topic.

For one thing, wireless carriers and mobile service operators don't like cellphone jammers because they can also block legal communications, or worse, emergency cell phone use like 911 calls. But yet prison officials still need to find an acceptable way to stop illegal cellphone usage on their premises.

Tecore Networks recently partnered with the Mississippi Department of Corrections and Global Tel-Link, which supplies communications services to jails, to commercially deploy Tecore's managed access system. Tecore said that, to this date, it is the first commercial deployment in prisons located in the U.S.

Tecore has successfully installed its Intelligent Network Access Control (iNAC) Managed Access system at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Miss.

The iNAC is a multi-carrier, multi-technology platform that prevents unauthorized mobile phone use, but also allows legitimate calls and 911 calls.

In essence, Tecore has agreements with the four cellular providers in the area so that calls within the 18,000-acre prison facility are directed to Tecore's platform, said Casey Joseph, CTO at Tecore. “Tecore becomes the cell site of choice for the prison.”

Tecore then checks the SIM or device against the database to see if the call is authorized or not. If it is authorized, it continues to the commercial carrier's system. If it is not, the call is permanently blocked.

In the ensuing month that it has been in utilization, Tecore found over 216,280 attempts from as many as 602 contraband mobile phones trying to connect to the Tecore communications system. That's over 7,200 illegal attempts per day.

“No one at the prison was prepared for that amount of activity,” said Amit Malhotra, vice president of marketing at Tecore.

While the Tecore system covering the Parchman prison facility is huge, the platform can also scale down to cover the local city jail as well, Malhotra noted. Interestingly, as contraband mobile phone usage decreased at the Mississippi prison, Global Tel-Link found revenues for its landline communications system increased over fifteen percent.

Tecore has spent the last two years working with the FCC, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, as well CTIA (The Wireless Association), individual wireless operators and prison authorities on the platform and to make sure it could be installed legally and without any issues.

For its part, the CTIA has fully endorsed the system and wrote a press release. “The wireless industry has gone on record as being totally against mobile phone jammers, arguing that they can stop legitimate communications from taking place, and that in general, wireless carriers don't want anything they don't own attaching to their networks."

“Now mobile technologies such as managed access and cell phone detection allow prison officials to identify the exact location of a contraband cell phone, track its utilization and provide opportunities to retrieve the device and prosecute those in possession. The alternative technologies also can be used to identify how – and by whom – these contraband devices are being smuggled into prison facilities. These solutions are crucial for law enforcement that otherwise face an uphill battle trying to disrupt the illicit operations of prison gangs, like in the recent arrests of Nuestra Familia gang members in California. These law enforcement techniques would not be possible with jamming,” the association said in a prepared statement.

It will be interesting to see how quickly Tecore's system can be implemented in other state and federal prisons across the U.S.

The rapid proliferation of cell phones today eventually raised problems such as their potential use to invade privacy or contribute to rampant and egregious academic cheating. In addition, public backlash was growing against the intrusive disruption cell phones introduced in daily life.

While older analog cell phones often suffered from chronically poor reception and could even be disconnected by simple interference such as high frequency noise, increasingly sophisticated digital phones have led to more elaborate counters.

Cell phone jamming devices are an alternative to more expensive measures against cell phones, such as Faraday cages, which are mostly suitable as built in protection for structures. They were originally developed for law enforcement and the military to interrupt communications by criminals and terrorists. Some were also designed to foil the use of certain remotely detonated explosives.

The civilian applications were apparent, so over time many companies originally contracted to design jammers for government use and U.S. state and federal prisons switched over to sell these devices to private entities. Since then, there has been a slow but steady increase in their purchase and use, especially in major metropolitan areas.

As with other radio jamming equipment, cell phone jammers block cell phone use by sending out radio waves along the same frequencies that cellular phones utilize. This causes enough interference with the communication between mobile phones and towers to render the phones unusable.

On most retail phones, the network would simply appear out of range. Most cell phones use different bands to send and receive communications from towers, called frequency division duplexing, or FDD. Cell phone jammers can work by either disrupting phone to tower frequencies or tower to phone frequencies.

Smaller handheld models block all bands from 800 MHz to 1900 MHz within a 30-foot range. Small devices tend to use the former method, while larger more expensive models may interfere directly with the tower.

Tecore also added that that once all prisons in the U.S. have been fully implemented, the company wants to start offering its system to other courtries as well. Canada has already indicated a firm interest in the solution.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: Tecore Networks.