Fez, known globally for curing quality leather using traditional techniques, is the second largest city in Morocco with a population of 1.7 million people. RADEEF has the responsibility of ensuring efficient distribution of water and electricity to all inhabitants over the entire territory of the prefecture of Fez.
RADEEF uses several hundred radio modems to manage the distribution of water and electricity. The existing modems are old, using serial connections and are not compliant with new security requirements that are now mandatory in Morocco for such applications. The need to upgrade provided RADEEF with an ideal opportunity to migrate to a modern IP solution. But it was also important to ensure any new solution would be both state-of-the-art and future proofed.
After exhaustive research, RADEEF selected RipEX2 as the optimal solution. Not only does it easily meet the new government security requirements but network throughput prospects are beyond what RADEEF had thought possible. Other features of RipEX2 that RADEEF benefits from include the RipEX2-HS hot standby Master station, interference tolerance, scalability of the radios and RACOM’s Migration solution which allows one by one legacy replacements with no outage during migration and no additional expensive HW required.
Phase one of the migration is built around a star topology and consists of two sub-networks of twenty five RipEX2 units, each with a RipEX2-HS at the centre. Two more RipEX2-HS stations are used to connect the sub-networks to the control centre. During deployment, SOHIME, the integrator, assigned two engineers to the project to join a RACOM engineer sent from HQ and RADEEF engineers. Excellent cooperation and teamwork between the three parties involved, ensured maximum success with most connections being highly modulated between 64 and 256 QAM.
Having successfully commissioned the first phase, another 180 sites will be migrated in 2020. And discussions have already started to improve the solution even further. The SCADA centre is at the other side of the city from the networks but as there is LOS between the two, there is the possibility of using a RACOM RAy microwave link instead of narrow radio channel to speed up data transmissions on this link.
