A winner of multiple awards, this parcel group provide innovative, high quality and time sensitive solutions across
its brand and Local franchised network focusing on express parcel services for SMEs.
The parcel group has a reputation for being the most innovative carrier in the express parcels sector. Thanks
to its platform, customers receive a one-hour delivery window via SMS or email, so they don’t need to wait in all
day. While another feature allows customers to watch the progress of their parcel on a real-time map, and it also
supplies a final 15-minute time slot.
To meet its exacting customer service standards, the parcel group has invested heavily in technology. One such
area is around the connectivity at each of its 84 owned sites and over 120 franchise sites across the UK. This
ranges from a Superhub, a 33-acre site and the largest of its kind in Europe, able to sort up to 72,000 parcels per
hour – down to smaller, local depots that act as the last stage before delivery to the door.
“Our operations need access to critical systems and over the years the amount of data we need to handle at each
site has grown consistently. “A typical site will have hundreds of staff each with handheld devices, a well-regarded
and poorly performing WiFi can have a direct impact on our ability to meet the tight deadlines that we need to hit
for our customers.”
So, in 2007, the parcel group engaged with ANSecurity (ANS secure infrastructure specialist to advise it on a Wi-Fi
upgrade at one of its growing depots that was starting to reach capacity. The project scope also required advice
on creating a longer-term strategy to ensure that its wireless connectivity would be able to deliver the highest
levels of reliability with potential for future expansion.
ANSecurity, a top tier Ruckus Networks partner, conducted detailed site surveys to model both coverage and peak
usage to create a Wi-Fi design using innovative beam forming technology from the Ruckus platform to deliver an
architecture suited to the demands of the parcel group – with room to grow as needed.
The design used a high availability controller layout to ensure that even in the event of a hardware failure, the
systems multi-redundant architecture would still ensure availability and balanced performance.
“The success of that initial project at what was a challenging site gave us confidence in ANS and that relationship
has grown ever since.”
Over the intervening years, ANS migrated the bulk of the Local sites to the unified architecture – to not only deliver
the required performance, but also to simplify the management of the remote architecture for the centralised
parcel group IT department. What started off as 802.11N (Wi-Fi 4) deployments have also undergone continual
improvement through the WiFi-5 and WiFi-6 evolutions to update end-of-life of legacy technologies while meeting
demands for additional bandwidth.
“ANS have been with us as we have grown and evolved and their expertise has helped us in many areas such as
capacity planning, wireless security and adding further resiliency within our wireless communication infrastructure
over time.” “This was particularly important during the recent pandemic when they helped us quickly to scale up
capacity at certain sites – especially with more staff working remotely that led to a spike in video conferencing
traffic across the network”
Today, ANS continues to work closely with the parcel group to ensure that connectivity not only meets current
demands, but is ready for the next generation of technologies.
“Having a partner for such a long time is a testament to how highly we regard the technical
expertise and professionalism of the ANS team.Wireless connectivity is just one part of the
hundreds of things we need to ensure that 5 million parcels get to where they are going each
week – and when it comes to WiFi, ANSecurity has never let us down!”
