LondonEnergy cuts down on outages

Overview

• Vodafone Multi-Protocol Label Switching helps LondonEnergy improve connectivity between sites, facilitate staff collaboration, and enables them to easily avoid outages.
• This supports them in treating nearly 750,000 tonnes of London’s waste and recyclables annually.
• With multiple sites across North London, LondonEnergy need to connect their locations to a robust and reliable network.

Meet LondonEnergy

LondonEnergy operate the second biggest waste contract in the UK, handling and treating nearly 750,000 tonnes of London’s waste and recyclables. They generate enough electricity to power over 80,000 homes annually. They also divert over 90% of waste away from landfill, saving nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2 yearly.

With a focus on diverting waste away from landfill, LondonEnergy’s facilities are integral – in 2019 alone, they helped redirect over 698,000 tonnes of waste.

Challenges

With seven sites across London, along with Reuse and Recycling Centres open to the public for household materials, LondonEnergy must understand how much waste there is across all their sites and know which are full.

“We need to provide the public and the local authority somewhere to dispose of their waste,” says Paul Rooney, IT Projects and Integrations Manager at LondonEnergy. “Having the ability to see which centres are full is crucial to our business and we can only do this if the sites can talk to each other.”

If information can’t be passed between sites or to the headquarters in North London, it could affect their ability to process waste as efficiently and even cost money, which was proven when there was an issue with one of the lines.

“We had a problem with the old solution, where we had about four days of downtime on the primary line, and the secondary line that we paid for wasn’t working,” explains Frederick Odutola, Head of Information Technology at LondonEnergy. Not only that, but the business found themselves logging and chasing over 70% of issues. It was time to look for a new provider to offer the support LondonEnergy needed.

Solutions

“We approached a few providers, but Vodafone was the best fit for us and came up with the best solution for our business,” says Rooney.

Vodafone deployed MPLS, a routing technique that sends data from one point to the next, in the shortest path, rather than through long network addresses. This means data can travel much faster and gives LondonEnergy the advantage of a dynamic and future-ready service.

“Some of our sites are quite remote, but we had a terrific team at Vodafone working with us to make it happen,” added Rooney. The MPLS solution from Vodafone provides two different lines for data to travel, as well as a 4G back-up, making it more reliable. And where LondonEnergy’s old provider saw them chasing almost three quarters of problems themselves, Vodafone offer a portal to check statuses and reports.

Result

Using MPLS from Vodafone, LondonEnergy can send business critical and time sensitive data from site to site, allowing them to keep track of the quantity and location of waste at their facilities. They also have peace of mind that if anything were to happen, they have a robust system to help avoid outages and downtime.

“Using Vodafone MPLS, there’s a better connection between our remote sites and HQ and we’ve increased capacity,” says Rooney. “Now we know that if we were to lose connectivity, either at HQ or our other sites, there’s still capacity to keep running as a business.”

With the improved speed and performance from Vodafone’s MPLS, staff at LondonEnergy can collaborate faster, with easier access to tools such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams, which struggled to run before.

Another unexpected benefit has been the ability to keep an eye on sites more effectively. With the new MPLS network, the company can better monitor their CCTV system, without downtime, enabling them to detect theft and help keep their facilities safe.

Finally, the LondonEnergy team are spending less time logging network issues, giving them more time to do their jobs. And with plans to transform their existing HQ into an innovative £1b new site and eco-park, LondonEnergy have a solution that’s future proof.