Highways England awards NRTS contract to Telent Technology services

Highways England (HE) has awarded the second National Roads Telecommunications Service (NRTS) contract, valued £450m ($602m), to Telent Technology Services. The project aims to keep road users as safe and informed as possible on the UK's motorways and will run for seven years from March 2018. In addition, this technology will also continue to support the smart motorway and expressway programmes.
December 19, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
8101 Highways England (HE) has awarded the second National Roads Telecommunications Service (NRTS) contract, valued £450m ($602m), to 525 Telent Technology Services. The project aims to keep road users as safe and informed as possible on the UK's motorways and will run for seven years from March 2018. In addition, this technology will also continue to support the smart motorway and expressway programmes.


The new service will renew equipment and provide an open, flexible and scalable telecommunications network to meet the future needs of the business as well as support HE in the development of connected vehicles and 5G.

NRTS connects HE's seven regional control centres, the national traffic operations centre and the 30,000 roadside technology assets including message signs, CCTV cameras and emergency roadside telephones.

These items include 3,327 CCTV cameras, 3,774 message signs, 229 weather stations and 7,155 SOS phones. The network enables traffic information services to provide accurate, real-time travel information to drivers and travel news providers. The message signs help warn drivers of potential hazards and display real-time journey information.

Tony Malone, chief information officer at HE, said: “Safety is at the heart of everything we do and this network, the central nervous system for England’s motorways, enables us to operate safe roads. We are pleased to be working with Telent Technology Services to deliver the reliability, resilience and innovation that will enable us to keep drivers safe and informed on our roads.”

Urban Traffic Control

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Tachometer breaks cause nearly 1,700 road closures, says IAM
    December 11, 2015
    Tachometer breaks, the mandatory rest stops commercial operators must take when driving, were the cause of nearly 1,700 road closures in one year alone, according to newly released figures from IAM Drive & Survive. According to the Road Haulage Association, 85 per cent of everything sold in the UK is carried by truck at some stage of the supply chain, with this number set to increase as more retail purchases are made online in the run up to Christmas. The numbers come from a Freedom of Information re
    Read More
  • Smartphone - the next technology for charging and tolling?
    January 25, 2012
    With all the debates over the most suitable future technology or technologies for charging and tolling, is it not time for the industry to look at what the rest of ITS is doing and bring a rank outsider - the smart phone - closer into the fold? By Jack Opiola, D'Artagnan Consulting LLC
    Read More
  • Exelis and TrafficLand partner to deliver real time weather information
    January 6, 2015
    TrafficLand has partnered with information solutions provider Exelis and TrafficLand to apply Exelis’ Helios next-generation image science to America’s largest traffic camera network to deliver real-time weather condition information at a hyper-local level. The Helios digital platform applies Exelis image science to thousands of ground-based cameras and sensors across the US. Access to the Helios data is made available through three standard application programming interfaces (APIs), Helios4Forecast,
    Read More
  • Alstom consortiums awarded contracts for Cairo metro line 3
    March 10, 2015
    Alstom has signed two contracts with Egypt’s National Authority for Tunnels (NAT) to supply the signalling system in a consortium with Thales and, in partnership with Colas Rail, Orascom and ARABCO, the infrastructure of the phase 4A of Cairo metro line 3, currently under construction. Alstom’s shares in these contracts are worth around US$96 million. Cairo’s metro currently carries three million passengers per day and this is expected to reach five million by 2020. Its network includes two fully operationa
    Read More

Highlighted Content