Wales & West Utilities has brought in MDNX to create and manage an integrated wide area network to deliver connectivity to 22 offices and 1,500 telemetry sites across Wales and South West of England.
The network will deliver speeds of up to 100mbps to the company's head office in Newport, South Wales, and offices across the region. The new network will deliver annual cost savings of 20 percent, according to the utility.
Wales & West Utilities' catchment area covers a gas network of over 35,000km of mains, serving a population of over 7.5 million people with 24 manned sites and over 1,500 telemetry locations.
The incumbent network at Wales & West Utilities was based on a combination of MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) and private circuits for data connectivity between all of its manned sites, and ISDN circuits and PBX (private branch exchange) services throughout both manned offices and telemetry sites.
But the network needed to be updated and Wales & West Utilities also wanted to achieve ongoing cost efficiencies and network improvements throughout the duration of the new contract term. MDNX is providing faster switching systems and lower cost lines to help achieve this.
"We wanted to improve the stability, resilience and performance of our communications network," said Bernard Murphy, technical architect at Wales & West Utilities. "We wanted to form a long term relationship that will bring added value within the business environment. As our networking demands continue to grow, we felt that it was important that our network supplier can be flexible enough to supply us with the best potential technologies that will meet our current and future needs."