Case Study:
Government Met Office Telex Outsource

Historically, the Met Office has made great use of telex as a system to connect with its forecast network and to deliver weather related services. As with many clients, usage has declined, but support still needs to be retained. Using Wirefast as the gateway between the users and the Met Office, support for this legacy technology can be maintained, without the need to retain skills or infrastructure in house.

Residual telex use at the Met Office includes data gathering outposts such as weather ships operating in remote areas of the world's oceans and delivery of weather services to customers such as the UK Coast guard and National Air Traffic Services.

In the case of the ships, the transmission network has evolved away from telex to an Inmarsat satellite transmission managed by Wirefast. Weather data is sent by each ship using a reverse charge number and received by Wirefast who immediately re-format it to email and forward it to Met Office HQ for use in forecasting.

The ships form a very important component of the forecast network. Many operate in isolated regions of the world's oceans so without their efforts the Met Office would not have access to actual weather information from those areas.

Moving away from telex has not only simplified the technology infrastructure at the Met Office but has also helped to reduce costs through decommissioning local Telex hardware.

An added benefit of the Wirefast service is that telex transmissions are delivered pre-formatted and via email, which is much more in keeping with how the Met Office want the process to work.