The Car Park Is Now a Networked Service

A modern car park looks self-contained, but much of its operation now happens elsewhere. A payment request may pass through an app, gateway or acquirer. A camera event may need to reach a control room or an enforcement platform. A charger may need to contact a management system before a session can start. Occupancy data may feed signs, apps and operator dashboards. The site is clearly physical, but the service is increasingly networked.

That changes what resilience means for a car park and the networks it relies on. The question is no longer only whether the equipment is powered, or whether a device appears to have a connection. It is whether the driver can enter, pay, charge, exit and trust the record afterwards.

The clearest national signal of this shift is the National Parking Platform. Created by the Department for Transport and now run independently on a not-for-profit basis, it connects participating car parks to a shared platform so drivers can pay using an approved app of their choice. It is a shared layer rather than another app:

• it connects the parking apps drivers already use to participating car parks;
• a driver can keep using a preferred app in more places, without downloading a new one; and
• it gives parking operators and service providers a common digital layer for payments, availability data and shared policy frameworks.

The platform is no longer only a trial-stage initiative. The National Parking Platform is an open, not-for-profit platform connecting multiple parking service providers to thousands of locations nationwide, with the British Parking Association leading a sector consortium to operate and scale the rollout. Recent updates demonstrate continued adoption, including Birmingham City Council joining the platform, Tower Hamlets becoming the first London borough to go live, and East Hertfordshire, Welwyn Hatfield and Stevenage joining as part of the wider national rollout.

More of the parking operation now therefore depends on a working connection than at any point before. That dependence runs across three levels:

• The device at the site;
• The network path that carries its traffic; and
• The platform behind it.

A resilient car park has to hold up at all three.

The systems in a connected car park often share dependencies. A single connectivity issue at a site can affect payment, number-plate capture, enforcement evidence, EV charging, occupancy data, customer service and reporting at the same time. What appears as a payment problem at the exit and a data gap in the back office may be one fault expressed in several places.

These failures are rarely total. More often, a device may appear online and the link may be technically available, but the workflow still fails to complete: an authorisation times out, a plate match falls outside tolerance, or a charging session will not start. Monitoring is important, but it needs to look beyond whether a device is online and contactable. It should also help identify cases where devices appear healthy while drivers are still unable to enter, pay or leave.

The consequence is commercially important. When the connection degrades, several revenue, compliance and customer-service workflows can degrade with it. The first sign may not be a monitoring alert, but an operational symptom: a queue at the exit, calls from customers at payment terminals, a disputed charge, or a charger that shows as available but will not start a session.

This is why parking failures often arrive first as ambiguity, before the operator can work back to a clear diagnosis:

• the site team sees a queue;
• the back office sees missing transactions;
• the customer-service team sees complaints;
• the finance team sees reconciliation gaps.

Resilient, observable connectivity reduces that ambiguity, because it helps separate a local or wide-area link issue from a payment, app, platform or equipment fault.

Because these systems are interdependent, the cost of a connectivity incident is best understood across several dimensions, not as a single calculation or number.

Revenue and payment continuity

When payments fail, operators can face lost or deferred revenue, inefficient manual handling and customer complaints. However, much of the modern payment path sits beyond the car park itself. If a payment app, gateway or acquirer has an incident, the fault may sit within the provider’s systems rather than the site’s own connectivity. In that scenario, local connectivity can remain healthy while drivers across multiple locations are unable to pay through the affected route.

This is where payment resilience matters. Where car parks use more than one payment method, and those methods do not all depend on the same upstream systems, one route may continue to operate if another is unavailable. For example, pay-on-foot machines may keep working even if a digital payment app or online payment route is disrupted.

App and gateway outages do happen, but day-to-day payment friction is also widespread. RAC research found that 73 per cent of drivers who had used a parking app in the previous year experienced difficulties. Poor mobile signal on the driver’s device was the most common issue, reported by 70 per cent, alongside failed payments and apps not recognising the car park.

These problems can arise at different points in the payment chain. In some cases, the issue may be local, such as poor mobile coverage at the site on a single network. In others, the failure may sit with the payment app, gateway or provider. To the driver, however, the experience is the same: they cannot pay.

Enforcement fairness and appeal risk

When machines are unavailable and consumer mobile signal is poor, enforcement becomes harder to defend, and a charge is more likely to be overturned on appeal. The point for operators is practical and operational: enforcement integrity rests on the payment and evidence chain being demonstrably available, and connectivity is part of that chain. A system that can show it was working, and retain the records to prove it, protects the operator and the driver alike.

Customer trust

Drivers do not tend to separate an app outage from an operator problem, a site network fault or a payment-provider failure. The visible failure is simply that they could not pay, exit or charge. As parking becomes more app-based, each interruption becomes a customer-experience event, and confidence is slow to rebuild once it is lost.

Data, reconciliation and visibility

Connected operations depend on transaction records, audit trails, availability data and exception reporting. Partial failures create sessions that have to be repaired, refunded or reconciled afterwards, and they reduce the real-time visibility operators rely on for occupancy, equipment health and security. The administrative cost of an incident often continues long after the connection is restored.

EV charging

Parking and charging are converging, and charging now carries a regulated reliability obligation. The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 require operators to meet a 99% average reliability requirement for rapid charge points and to publish that reliability. Because reliability and availability reporting depend on status data, loss of reachability is not just a technical inconvenience; it can affect the operator’s ability to evidence whether a charge point was available and working.

US-based research on charge-point performance reaches a similar conclusion from the operator’s perspective: standard uptime figures often do not give operators the diagnostic detail they need. A 2026 arXiv preprint proposes performance metrics beyond uptime, including a distinction between Fault Time, when a charger reports an internal fault or malfunction, and Unreachable Time, when a charger loses communication with its management system. The paper notes that this loss of communication can prevent remote monitoring and control, and may interrupt charging sessions where user authentication or payment authorisation cannot be completed. In its case study, the authors found that high-frequency network instability and persistent “zombie chargers” could remain hidden in standard annual reporting. For operators, the useful distinction is between faults at the charger and reachability issues in the network or management layer, because each points to a different operational response.

The practical value of that distinction is that it helps operators understand where to act. A charger fault, a weak mobile signal, a payment-gateway issue and a loss of reachability to a management platform may all present differently in technical terms, but they create the same operational problem: the customer cannot complete the intended transaction. Once that happens, the impact rarely stays contained within one system.

Put together, the cost of a single connectivity or reachability incident stacks up across:

• lost or deferred paid parking sessions;
• failed or interrupted EV charging sessions;
• weaker enforcement and greater appeal exposure;
• additional customer-support workload;
• manual reconciliation of unsettled sessions; and
• the erosion of customer trust, which is the slowest to recover.

Several developments are deepening the dependence on connectivity at the same time.

• Open platforms and interoperability. The National Parking Platform points to a future where operators support multiple apps, shared location codes and reconciled transactions across providers. Reliable data exchange becomes a central operational requirement, not a background convenience.
• Cashless and digital-first payment. Removing cash reduces handling cost and improves data capture, but it increases dependence on apps, card readers and network access. When the connection fails, the result is exclusion and dispute rather than mild inconvenience, which is the argument for monitored, resilient payment paths.
• Camera-led enforcement. Smart parking increasingly uses fixed cameras and mobile number-plate recognition rather than sensors alone. Each depends on a reliable uplink for timestamped evidence, access checks and exception handling.
• Occupancy intelligence and kerbside management. Availability data now feeds pricing, navigation and, in some places, public-transport integration. The value of that data depends on it being current, which in turn depends on a dependable connection that can carry it in time to be useful.
• EV charging as a revenue layer. Car parks are becoming charging destinations, adding charge initiation, payment, roaming, status reporting and support to the list of connected workflows a site has to sustain.
• Fraud and payment trust. The growth of QR-code fraud, known as quishing, has found a target in the car park. Criminals place fake codes over legitimate signage to send drivers to convincing but fraudulent payment pages. Action Fraud recorded nearly 800 reports of QR-code fraud and £3.5 million of losses in the year to April 2025, and a Bureau of Investigative Journalism survey found 123 of 373 responding local authorities said their car parks had been targeted. Many local authorities and operators have responded by confirming they either do not use QR codes at all or mitigate by checking equipment regularly; the National Parking Platform, for its part, states plainly that it will never use QR codes on its signage. The implication is a security one: trusted payment routes, authenticated and managed device estates, and assurance over the payment path matter as much as raw availability.
• Regulation and fairness. Continued pressure on signage, grace periods and appeals means operators increasingly have to show that their systems were available and their evidence sound. That is difficult without dependable connectivity and a clear record of how the system performed at the time.

Taken together, these pressures point to a set of resilience requirements:

• resilient site connectivity for the whole operational stack: payment devices, cameras, barriers, kiosks, EV chargers and occupancy systems, not the payment device alone;
• multi-network cellular capability, especially where fixed broadband is absent, unreliable or uneconomic for smaller sites; resilience beyond the radio access layer, so the site is not still dependent on a single core, control-plane relationship or upstream route;
• monitoring that separates device failure, network failure, coverage degradation, payment-provider failure and platform unavailability;
• operational evidence logs that support appeals, enforcement decisions and reconciliation;
• secure, managed connectivity for devices that handle payments, vehicle identifiers and operational records;
• interoperability readiness for shared platforms such as the National Parking Platform; and
• reduced dependence on single points of failure, where payment, number-plate capture and charging can otherwise rest on one router uplink, one SIM or one bearer.

Multi-network access is an important step, but it is not the whole resilience question. A site may be able to reach more than one radio network while still depending on a single core or control-plane relationship. That leaves a deeper single point of failure in place. A stronger design separates not only the radio access path, but also the core dependency behind it.

CSL provides this through multi-network DualCore® connectivity, delivered through rSIM® and our multi-bearer IoT Routers. For operators, that puts resilience in the connectivity layer behind the devices already on site, rather than requiring a wholesale replacement of payment devices, cameras, barriers or chargers.

For any site, three questions separate a resilient operation from a fragile one:

• Is the device reachable?
• Is the workflow completing?
• Can the operator prove what happened afterwards?

Where the answer to any of these is uncertain, the connectivity is not yet resilient.

The connected car park will not be judged by whether individual devices appear online. It will be judged by whether the service journey completes: whether drivers can enter, pay, charge, exit and trust the record afterwards.

That is why resilient connectivity now belongs in the parking operating model. It protects the path between the site and the services the site depends on, and it gives operators a faster way to understand what has failed when the issue sits beyond the car park itself.

The operators who design for that reality will be better placed to keep sites open, maintain sound evidencing and keep customer journeys moving. A companion CSL Building Resilience paper on parking systems will follow, setting out the engineering method: measuring functional completion, watching the workflow rather than the device, and rehearsing the degraded modes before they are needed.

CSL provides Critical Connectivity® across the parking sector, supporting payment machines, ANPR, smart parking, CCTV and EV charging. We are a member of the British Parking Association and a solution-provider member of the Parking Network community.

Our published case studies include EV charging and bay-enforcement connectivity for Parkingeye, and charge-point connectivity for CarCharger.ie; these and further examples are available at https://www.csl-group.com/case-studies/.

To discuss resilient connectivity for parking estates, payment systems, ANPR, EV charging or wider smart parking infrastructure, please contact CSL.

1. UK Department for Transport. “Government teams with parking giants to ensure drivers can use preferred apps in all car parks.” (21 May 2025). https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-teams-with-parking-giants-to-ensure-drivers-can-use-preferred-apps-in-all-car-parks
2. RAC. “Parking fail: three-quarters of drivers have run into difficulties when paying to park by mobile app.” (10 October 2025). https://media.rac.co.uk/parking-fail-three-quarters-of-drivers-have-run-into-difficulties-when-paying-to-park-by-mobile-app
3. UK Government. “The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 guidance.” (Updated 21 October 2024). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-public-charge-point-regulations-2023-guidance/public-charge-point-regulations-2023-guidance
4. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “‘Quishing’: new QR code scam sweeps UK car parks.” (27 June 2025). https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-06-27/quishing-new-qr-code-scam-sweeps-uk-car-parks
5. Ofcom. “Connected Nations update: Spring 2026.” (13 May 2026). https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/connected-nations-update-spring-2026
6. National Parking Platform. “The National Parking Platform (NPP).” (Accessed 9 July 2026). https://www.npp.org.uk/
7. “Beyond Uptime: Actionable Performance Metrics for EV Charging Site Operators.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.10861 (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10861