Communications inside the wall
One vendor to hold accountable
Prisoner telephony, tablets, video visitation and the secure network that carries them. Designed, installed and supported by one Australian company, under one service level agreement. From the SIP trunks in the data centre to the phone on the wall and the tablet in the cell.
One chain, one number to ring
Australian corrections agencies run some of the most demanding communications environments in the country. The system has to connect people in custody with their families, give investigators evidence that will survive a courtroom, and never become a security liability.
Most suppliers provide a platform and leave the customer to integrate the network, the cabling, the carriage and the field service around it. Ericom delivers the whole chain, so when a call fails there is no argument about whether the fault sits with the platform vendor, the network integrator or the carrier.
- 3 Australian corrections jurisdictions running the system
- 60 correctional sites live and supported today
- 1,700 wall phones in cells, wings and common areas
- 13,000+ in-cell tablets issued to people in custody
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Dirty data puts people in the wrong place
Poor data puts a person at the wrong site, gives them the wrong allowances, or lets them call somebody they should not. Cleaning it is the first task, not a migration afterthought.
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Local rules nobody wrote down
Every site has unspoken processes governing call time, allowances and restrictions. If the sites are not engaged during design, those rules surface after go-live instead of before it.
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Change management left until last
Communicating a new system to people in custody, to officers and to families is routinely deferred to the final weeks. It is the cheapest part of the programme and the one that decides how the first day feels.
The same team that delivered that programme is the team offered to every jurisdiction since, and the intent is to hand over the learnings as well as the technology.
Five parts, one service
A customer can take the telephony alone, or the full stack progressively. What does not change is that one company designs it, installs it, cables it and answers for it.
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Prisoner telephone system
A centralised, web-based calling platform hosted in an Australian government data centre, delivered with the network, circuits, recording, call control and handsets. Every call recorded, validated, controlled and searchable. Policy is set per PIN, per destination, per phone, per housing area or globally, covering service hours, call duration, intervals, blocked numbers, free-call entitlements and suspension with an automatic reinstatement date.
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Prisoner tablets
Corrections-grade tablets running calling, messaging, video visitation, education, requests, grievances, commissary and facility information. Not a second system: the same calling platform, the same call detail records, the same investigative tools, with the tablet recorded as the location.
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Secure in-facility network
The part that is invisible in a brochure and decisive in delivery. A secure wireless network we design, cable and install, deliberately standalone from the department corporate network, with coverage extendable across a whole facility later by change request.
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Investigations and intelligence
Recording and retention for the term of the contract, live monitoring, remote disconnect, three-way and call-forward detection, extra-dialled-digit detection, voice biometric verification, keyword search and alerting, and a chain-of-evidence model in which any modification of recorded data is detectable.
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Managed service and field support
An Australian help desk as the single point of contact for network devices, carrier outages, tablets and user problems, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Field service is a standing workstream rather than a warranty afterthought, tracked fault by fault, device by device.
Cutover is a risk problem, not a technology problem
Replacing a live prisoner communications system is solved before go-live, not during it. Clean data. Sites engaged early enough that their local rules surface during design rather than after cutover. Change management that starts long before the last minute. And a rollout that runs side by side with the system it replaces, so it can be rolled back in minutes rather than recovered over a weekend.
Questions corrections buyers ask
Can a tablet be turned back into a normal Android device?
No. The operating system is purpose-built for corrections and there is no stock Android image on the device to revert to. People in custody cannot reach device settings beyond volume, rotation and brightness, and cannot see or join other wireless networks. There is no cellular radio and there are no media slots.
Can the tablet camera be used to film the facility?
It cannot. The camera captures a photograph at login and for audit only, reviewable solely by staff with the relevant permission, and it functions only while the tablet is sitting in its charging station. The environment cannot be panned or filmed.
Does the tablet network touch our corporate network?
No. The tablets run on a separate wireless network isolated from departmental servers, with traffic carried over an encrypted VPN on a hidden network through a proxy, and no direct route to the internet. Communication between devices is blocked at the gateway. Both the hardware and the software have been through third-party penetration testing that simulated an actual deployment.
Does calling from a tablet weaken investigations?
The opposite. A tablet call runs on the same platform as a wall phone call, with the same controls and the same call detail record, so every investigative and analytical tool behaves identically. Because people call from their living quarters rather than queueing at a wall phone, there is more material available to analyse.
Do we have to replace our existing handsets?
Not necessarily. The platform supports mainstream analogue phones including handsets already installed, so handsets that already work can stay. Where new instruments are supplied the standard is a stainless steel prisoner telephone with an armoured cord and a braided lanyard.
Where does the data live, and who can see it?
In Australia, in an Australian government data centre, on redundant storage, retained for the term of the contract. A global audit report tracks every action inside the application and is exposed to the customer through role-based access control.
What is your security posture?
Ericom has achieved Essential Eight Maturity Level 3, validated through an independent CyberGRX audit. The corrections application platform is built against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and is audited annually against PCI-DSS, SOC 2 Type 2, NIST 800-53 and ISO 27001. A full cyber security incident response plan is available to customers on request.
Ask us how the cutover works
A briefing with the corrections team covers the method rather than the brochure: how a live system is migrated site by site, what has to be true before the first one goes, and what rollback looks like if it is not.
Book a briefing