Overview
Roadside retail specialist Ascona Group operates 61 fuel forecourts across the UK. Following rapid expansion through acquisition of independent and family-owned forecourt assets, the company needed to standardise fragmented network infrastructure and establish proactive support to maintain trading reliability across its growing estate.
Multi-site forecourt operators acquiring independent sites inherit diverse network configurations, telephony systems and connectivity providers. This fragmentation creates management complexity, billing inefficiencies and prolonged downtime during incidents.
Ascona Group required a managed network partner capable of consolidating its estate onto a standardised platform, delivering proactive monitoring and maintaining operational continuity during rapid growth.
Ascona Group's acquisition-led growth strategy delivered scale but introduced operational friction. Each acquired site brought different network providers, telephony configurations and technology standards. This created several challenges:
Multiple carriers, telephony systems and configurations across 61 sites complicated troubleshooting and increased mean time to resolution during incidents.
Diverse provider relationships and unused legacy telephone lines increased costs and administrative overhead.
Firehouse Restaurant locations experienced poor internet performance and payment processing delays, affecting customer satisfaction and revenue.
Reactive support models meant issues were discovered by customers or store teams rather than being prevented or resolved before impact.
Evolve designed and deployed a standardised managed network solution across the Ascona Group estate, beginning with Mako Networks SD-WAN deployment in 2012. The solution addressed infrastructure fragmentation and operational risk through several core components:
Evolve deployed Mako Networks appliances across all sites, creating consistent network design and centralised management. As Mako's sole Platinum Partner, Evolve provided PCI-certified infrastructure supporting payment systems, fuel sales and third-party integrations.
Each site received high-speed internet connectivity with automatic cellular failover, ensuring payment terminals, point-of-sale systems and guest Wi-Fi remained operational during primary circuit outages.
Evolve's UK-based Network Operations Centre provides round-the-clock monitoring with proactive issue detection and resolution. The support model focuses on preventing incidents before they affect trading operations.
Staged rollouts minimised operational impact, with typical site cutovers completing within a single day without disrupting fuel sales, shop operations or food service.
Standardised guest Wi-Fi across forecourts and Firehouse Restaurant locations improved customer experience while maintaining network segmentation for payment systems.
Standardised network design across 61 sites simplified management, reduced troubleshooting complexity and provided consistent performance.
Proactive monitoring and cellular failover eliminated guest Wi-Fi outages, supporting improved customer satisfaction at forecourt and restaurant locations.
Consolidation of providers and removal of unused telephone lines reduced recurring connectivity costs and billing administration.
PCI-certified network infrastructure maintained secure, reliable payment processing across fuel pumps, tills and restaurant terminals.
Single-day cutovers enabled fast integration of newly acquired sites without extended trading disruption, supporting Ascona's acquisition strategy.
24/7/365 NOC monitoring detects and resolves issues before store teams or customers experience impact, reducing reactive incident management.
Evolve delivers service-first managed network solutions for multi-site brands across retail, forecourts, QSR and hospitality. Our PCI Level 1-aligned SD-WAN, resilient Business Connectivity, Guest Wi-Fi and managed IT services are backed by a UK-based 24/7/365 Network Operations Centre.
We specialise in blueprint-led rollouts that protect trading minutes, reduce compliance risk and scale predictably across complex estates. Our proactive monitoring model means 86% of support interactions are outbound-we detect and resolve issues before sites feel the impact.
As Mako Networks' only Platinum Partner, we are the only network management company in the world to qualify as a PCI-certified Level 1 service provider, making us uniquely positioned to support hospitality and retail businesses requiring external PCI DSS certification.
For more information, contact us.