Stagecoach
Driving Microsoft Azure & Dynamics 365 for better customer experience.
The Client
Stagecoach is one of the UK’s best-known public transport companies. It provides a mixture of bus, coach and tram services in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Hull, Sheffield, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as routes linking smaller locations.
The company also runs megabus.com and jointly operates Scottish Citylink. It’s also the UK’s biggest bus and coach operator, with 24,000 employees serving three million passengers every day across 100 major UK bus depots.
Anecdotally, the feedback from the guys at each site is kind of bittersweet. Now the network is running at full speed, they’ve lost that time they had to go make a cup of tea and have a spot of breakfast while waiting for their machines to connect. They tell us everything works better, everything works quicker, and they’re much more efficient as a result. And, at the end of the day, that’s exactly what we want to hear. Their biggest worry these days is that they’ll have to make their round of toast in their own time!
The Challenge
Stagecoach’s legacy WAN infrastructure was no longer fit for purpose. It lacked bandwidth, security, and integration, and offered no visibility into network performance. As the company committed to a cloud-first strategy, the limitations of its network became a critical barrier to progress. The IT team couldn’t monitor outages or bandwidth issues in real time, relying instead on manual checks from staff at affected sites. Security was also a growing concern, with the need for centrally managed protocols becoming urgent.
“We had no way of knowing if or when a site was down, or if it was struggling for bandwidth,” said Graham Moore, Group Chief Information Officer at Stagecoach. “This led to completely avoidable downtime.”
The Solution
We worked with Stagecoach to deploy Secure SD-WAN. Having previously collaborated with us, their IT team trusted our ability to deliver a robust, scalable network tailored to the transport sector. The rollout replaced copper infrastructure with high-capacity fibre, enabling faster, more resilient connectivity. Our SD-WAN was designed to run across MPLS and internet-facing circuits, offering flexibility and performance.
“It’s quite an aggressive rollout,” Graham admitted. “We’re doing about three sites per day… we’re seeing great leaps forward in terms of network performance, resilience, security and visibility.
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The Results
Stagecoach now benefits from a secure, high-performance network with centralised monitoring and control. Each site is equipped with next-generation firewalls, offering protection across all traffic directions. When a primary link failed at the Peterborough site, our SD-WAN seamlessly switched to the secondary link, no one noticed the outage.
Bandwidth has increased nearly eight-fold, from 8Mbps to 60Mbps. Local internet breakouts have eliminated bottlenecks, improving speed and reliability. The IT team’s reputation has transformed, especially with the successful rollout of Office 365 and Teams, which supported remote collaboration during lockdowns.
“The business has pretty much survived the last 12 months on the back of our new network,” Graham said. “Who knows where we would be now if we hadn’t started our Node4 rollout before COVID-19 hit.
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The Node4 Difference
Our SD-WAN gave Stagecoach the confidence to accelerate its cloud-first strategy, adopt new SaaS tools, and improve operational efficiency. The feedback from site teams has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Everything works better, everything works quicker, and they’re much more efficient as a result,” Graham shared. “Their biggest worry these days is that they’ll have to make their round of toast in their own time!”