The tablet program at our county jail crashed hard last Tuesday

I volunteer with a reentry nonprofit and we set up 15 tablets for inmates to access GED prep materials, but the wifi router they installed was meant for a coffee shop not a concrete building with steel doors lol. By day three, four tablets were offline and the rest kept freezing mid-lesson. Anybody else seen tech rollouts fail inside jails because of infrastructure?

3 comments

3 Comments

reese_lee91mo ago

Our program at Mid-State Correctional finally stopped the spinning wheel of death when we switched to mesh network access points. We got three Ubiquiti units mounted in the hallway ceilings, not the administrative offices, and daisy-chained them together with ethernet. That cut our dropout rate from like 60% to maybe 5% in two weeks. Still had one tablet that kept crashing because the inmate was using it to play solitaire instead of studying math, but that's a people problem not a tech problem. Did you guys ever try running a cable to a dedicated access point in the pod itself?

pat_moore1mo ago

Man we had 12 tablets for a similar program in our county and the wifi router was literally a $40 Linksys from Target. By the second week I was basically doing tech support through the booking window, trying to walk inmates through a hard reset while they're holding the tablet up to the glass. The concrete walls and steel doors just kill any signal, I learned the hard way that you need industrial access points not consumer grade gear. Our whole rollout turned into a joke where inmates started calling it the "spinning wheel of doom" because the loading icon would freeze for like 10 minutes.

murphy.tessa1mo ago

Honest question though, is that really that big of a deal? A 10 minute loading time sucks but it's not like they're going anywhere or anything lol. I feel like people forget these are inmates not customers trying to stream Netflix in 4K. They've got time to wait for a spinning wheel.