South East Water–Vysiion network upgrade: SCADA and telemetry impacts for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
South East Water has appointed Vysiion to design and deliver a new integrated communications network for its IT and OT assets ahead of the UK-wide public switched telephone network (PSTN) switch-off scheduled for January 2027. The upgrade will replace legacy PSTN-based links that currently support remote monitoring and control of treatment works, pumping stations and pressure management assets, shifting these to digital, IP-based connectivity. For civil and water engineers, the change will affect telemetry design, resilience planning and outage risk during the migration of critical SCADA and alarm systems.
Technical Brief
- Migration design must maintain continuous SCADA visibility to remote treatment works and pumping assets.
- Dual-path or failover routing will be critical to avoid single points of failure in alarm paths.
- Cyber-security hardening of OT endpoints is implied, with stricter segregation between plant and office networks.
- Asset owners will need detailed cutover phasing plans to prevent loss of remote start/stop and interlocks.
- Field devices using legacy serial protocols will require gateways or RTU upgrades to operate over IP.
- Water-quality and pressure safety alarms must be revalidated end-to-end after each communications switchover.
Our Take
Vysiion’s earlier £3M AMP8 Telephony and Resilience Framework with Portsmouth Water suggests it is becoming a specialist supplier for UK water-utility IT/OT convergence, which should reduce integration risk for South East Water as the 2027 PSTN switch-off approaches.
Ofwat’s £30.5M redress package and requirement for an Independent Monitor at South East Water signals that any new communications network will likely be scrutinised not just for resilience but for how it demonstrably improves service reliability and incident response.
Within our 951 Infrastructure stories, only a subset link ‘Projects’ and ‘Safety’ tags to water-utility control systems, so this move towards integrated IT/OT networking at South East Water is part of a relatively small but growing cluster of safety-driven digital upgrades in regulated utilities.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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