Environment Agency

The Environment Agency (EA) is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which works to create better places for people and wildlife, and support sustainable development in England.

As part of its service, the EA monitors a number of environmental factors, including rain and water levels, which are then fed through to internal teams, including its flood management team. The environmental data it collects is also distributed to other public organisations and partners including the Met Office, and is seen as a critical national service.

The Challenge

One of the EA’s priorities as an environmental body is to monitor and issue warnings of flooding. Using 5,000 telemetry devices dispersed across England, the EA is able to flag rising river levels, amongst other factors, which could have an adverse impact on the environment.

The view from the Environment Agency:

“We selected Intercity for this tender because the company not only had all the relevant and necessary accreditations under its belt, but also the telecoms and technical expertise to deliver the solution to our exact requirements.”

Previously, the EA transferred this data predominantly via BT telephone lines, which are set to be discontinued over the next five years. In 2018, the EA issued a tender to contract an external provider to provide a solution that could help manage these devices off-site.

The Solution

Following a rigorous tender process, Intercity Technology was engaged to create, implement and manage a bespoke centralised connectivity solution for all of the EA’s 5,000 monitoring devices.

These monitoring devices send data such as rainfall and tide surges, back to the centre, with messages increasing in frequency as the weather conditions worsen. This is done to ensure that the information arriving at the systems hosted at the Intercity’s data centres is in real time.

The service is supported by two of Intercity’s data centres, which are monitored 24/7. This ensures that the EA is provided with a highly-resilient telecoms network which can deliver the constant connectivity and availability needed for these many field-based devices to operate and distribute this critical environmental information.

“Our partnership with the Environment Agency has been a pleasure from the beginning. We’ve been able to work really closely with their team and were trusted to demonstrate our technical ability to create a refined, reliable service to help deliver on its environmental monitoring requirements.”

Chief Commercial Officer at Intercity Technology