Mersey Rail

Customer overview

Mersey Rail is the leading, local commuter rail and underground network for those who live and work in the Liverpool area.

The network has over 60+ stations and covers over 75 miles of route, of which 6.5 miles are underground. Transporting over 34Million passengers a year (110,000 commuters every week day), it forms the most heavily used urban railway network within the UK outside London.

Voted most reliable train operator in the UK 2019, keeping things moving is their day to day business.

Customer Challenge

Connectivity drives much of the systems infrastructure required for Mersey Rail to successfully run and manage their transportation network. Meaning the impact of a connection failure and any subsequent downtime is felt across almost all areas of the business, both internally and externally. For example, an outage to the retail POS system would prevent payments being taken, directly impacting upon the customer experience and their ability to travel; as well as impacting profit margin from lost sales. Furthermore, key head office functions would be impacted with multiple workforce applications severely compromised, impacting business efficiencies and causing costly downtime.

Key points

• A high bandwidth connection with strong resilience, to prevent downtime in the event of outages
• 60+ site MPLS IPVPN network
• A fully resilient MPLS network across all of sites, which protects against any impact of downtime.

Customer Goal

With an infrastructure that is highly reliant on connectivity, Mersey Rail required a partner who could ensure a high bandwidth connection with strong resilience. So that in the event of any outages (either planned or unplanned) a robust backup overlay would trigger, protecting the business against the consequences felt by any downtime both to the business and their customers.

Our solution

Highly resilient connectivity

Combining the traffic routing capabilities of MPLS with the VPN virtual network creates a fully-functioning alternative to traditional leased line WAN solutions.

M247 provided an MPLS IPVPN network to cover Mersey Rails head office, over 60 site in addition to their 4 train depots throughout Merseyside. Connectivity is delivered using a combination of both traditional fibre or FTTC where fibre was not available, with the addition of M247’s wireless radio network to offer an increased level of resiliency.

Results and benefits

Mersey Rail benefited from a fully resilient MPLS network across all of their sites. Allowing them to provide up to the minute train information at each station for the waiting public/customers. Ensuring that POS at each location is always live and up to date; whilst also being able to offer a value added service to customers through the provision of Wi-Fi at the stations.

Ian Johnson, Information Systems Service Delivery Manager for Mersey Rail commented: “M247 are flexible, they understand our business and the support team are all knowledgeable in their area.”