Mexico Nationwide Utility Critical Communications System - Benefits DMR Open Standard

CFE (Comision Federal de Electricidad/ Federal Electrical Commission) is the parastate Electric Utility of Mexico. The company has 3 separate divisions handling Transmission, Distribution and Generation. CFE divisions are separated in regions with Transmission having 9 regions across the entire country. The divisions had a wide mix of LMR systems and standards as they were all purchasing independently. In 2017 the ITC department in CFE TX decided to standardize using DMR Tier 3 in order to guarantee interoperability and long term open ecosystem for added value applications and solutions. CFE launched an RFP in 2019 based on DMR Tier III standard and required that all participants demonstrate multiple brands operating on a demo system. The demo required voice and data messages to be sent across the system and received by at least 3 different vendor terminals. The system has been in continuous deployment with 4 Macro Regional Node Controllers in HA distributed across 8 different data centers in the country. The system is scaled to grow to more than 800 sites and allow CFE transmission to provide service to the other divisions (Generation and Distribution).