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Environment Agency: Safeguarding our Natural Environment Through IoT Connectivity

The Environment Agency are implementing an unsteered roaming SIM solution to enable them to collect data through ‘always on’ communications across 5,000 sites across the UK.

Background

The Environment Agency (EA) is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Established in 1996, the EA work to protect people and the environment through collaboration and regulation. The EA put the climate emergency at the heart of everything that they do and help society to adapt to environmental challenges such as flooding, drought, sea level rise and coastal change and improve the quality of the air, land and water by tackling pollution. By working with businesses, the EA monitor compliance with environmental regulations and believe a healthy and diverse environment enhances people’s lives and contributes to sustainable and economic growth.

EA data drives its ‘river and sea levels in England’ service and helps it make informed decisions about potential flooding. Approximately 5,500 telemetry outstations generate the data that underpins the flood forecasting and warning services across England.

The Challenge

The EA generated a Request for Proposal (RFP) to upgrade their telemetry communications infrastructure to a secure IP based communications technology. Their existing field monitoring outstations and telemetry systems were reliant on ‘legacy’ PSTN/CSD communications.

The EA collect data from over 5,500 sites across the UK and required a solution that would provide secure and ‘always on’ communications to transmit data via a resilient infrastructure with no risk of failure to central locations. As the EA need to respond to rapidly changing environmental conditions, having consistent and uninterrupted connectivity is paramount.

The Solution

Wireless Logic were able to meet the EA’s needs by working with them to roll out new IoT Mobile Communications by providing an IP based cellular connected solution for their outstations. This includes a service management overlay using our SIM management platform SIMPro and support infrastructure to replace existing PSTN and GSM services, responding to the RFQ request for  a connected SIM solution. This enables devices in remote locations to access the best available network coverage. By using this solution, the EA can benefit from ‘always on’ connectivity across the country with access to four UK networks.

Currently, the data is sent to regionalised self-hosted servers. In future, the data will be sent to the EA’s cloud solution for data gathering via a private resilient APN with “No Single Point of Failure” (NSPoF).

To aid resilience it was required that each remote telemetry unit SIM would need to have a dual private IP address and enable additional resilience at the core network in case of network failure. The device would re-establish a new data session through the secondary IP address and not lose connectivity.

We were able to offer SIMPro, all SIMs are managed via a dedicated SIM management platform as part of the full end-to-end solution.



The Outcome

By using cellular IoT connectivity, Wireless Logic supported the EA to monitor, manage and track all their active SIMs and devices across the UK in one window using SIMPro. With real-time data through a high-speed connection, the EA can make timely decisions on the impact of weather-related events that support their flood forecasting and warning services.

If you’re interested in learning more about our SIM Connectivity services, more information can be found here. Alternatively, please get in touch with us directly.

"One of the Environment Agency’s key aims in future proofing their capability to remotely monitor the environment has been through assessing the services from Wireless Logic. Having consistent and uninterrupted connectivity is paramount to ensure they can be responsible to their customer needs. For this reason, the Environment Agency required a solution that would provide secure and ‘always on’ communications to transmit data via a resilient infrastructure with no risk of failure to central locations."

Jon-Paul Clarke,
Business Development Director, Wireless Logic

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