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The Jury Is In on ATM Video Arraignment Application September 6, 1999 By Kelly Jackson Higgins It started with some dark fiber from the local cable franchise, and now the City of Alexandria, Va., is arraigning prisoners over its new private ATM network. The city's OC-3 ATM network runs the full-motion video application, with a 40-Mbps chunk of the pipe dedicated to it. Alexandria is the first of several localities in the Washington metropolitan area to use fiber pipes installed by local cable companies for constructing its own private network, typically with ATM. "Video arraignment in itself is not a new thing; the difference is that [we're doing it] over our own fiber" versus with a data service, says Gary Post, deputy director of IT for the City of Alexandria, which so far has integrated its police, courts, libraries and schools on the ATM backbone. Now the city's deputies don't have to escort prisoners the mile and a half from the jail to the courthouse to appear before the judge. The transmission is "broadcast quality, not herky-jerky, with shadows," Post says. "Judges want to see a clear picture of the person being arraigned, and to have [simultaneous] links to prior criminal history." Once the judge hands down his or her decision at the arraignment--bail or releasing the prisoner--it is automatically processed over the network, too. Both the judge's chambers and the jail run Fore Systems' ATM and video equipment, and the ATM QoS (Quality of Service) feature prioritizes video over data traffic, says James Webber, systems engineer for Sarcom, the Columbus, Ohio-based technology integration services company that installed and helps manage Alexandria's network. Sarcom has worked with Fore Systems on a number of similar ATM implementations. The video arraignment application alone is saving the city about $2,000 a month, and city officials are dropping all their leased T1 and 64-Kbps circuits, which should save about $25,000 per year. As it turned out, ATM was a less expensive option for the city than Sonet or pure outsourcing. "We can upgrade to OC-12 on any of the individual rings [easily]," Alexandria's Post says. All it takes is the hot-swap of an OC-12 card. Gigabit Ethernet wasn't an option at the time of the city's RFP because of its former physical-distance limitations. The only real glitch in the ATM cutover was with one of the fiber connections: Multimode fiber, rather than single-mode fiber, was strung from the city's network to the police department, which provides connectivity to the jail through a Fore ATM switch. The ATM switches and video systems require single-mode fiber, which is typical for intrasite connection. The multimode fiber caused some flickering and fuzzy video feeds during Alexandria's test runs of the arraignment application, says Sarcom's Webber. "Once we narrowed the problem to the fiber, we pulled single-mode fiber and connected the equipment, and the errors went away quickly," he says. Alexandria this year will add "911" digital radios for the police and fire departments to the ATM network. The Motorola radio equipment runs over the ATM network, "but it doesn't know that it's riding over ATM because there are T1-circuit emulation cards in the Fore 200BX ATM switch," says Eric Martinis, sales engineer for Sarcom. Alexandria's Post says the ATM 911 system will save the city about $3,000 a month over its previous microwave-based network.
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