Following a successful trial and contract award, the S.M. Group International, Inc. (SMi), a prominent Canadian engineering firm, and PowerTrunk, Inc., engineered, supplied, installed and commissioned a 16-site TETRA network in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia for BC Hydro, the third largest electrical utility in Canada.

In May, the network went live and successfully passed provisional acceptance becoming North America’s first ever operational TETRA network and is to be used by different departments of BC Hydro.

 The BC Hydro TETRA network consists of fifteen site base stations operating in UHF 400 MHz frequencies, one mast-mounted base station, two redundant, geographically-diverse switches, a five-console PowerTrunk CeCoCo® CAD system and 325 subscribers. Additional sites, consoles and subscribers will be added in the near future. In addition, the TETRA network was designed to interoperate with BC Hydro’s PABX and control centre as well as with its VHF legacy radio system in a fully integrated manner. TETRA’s superior speech quality, encryption capabilities, full and half-duplex private calls, group calls, text messaging and other voice and data services are intended to significantly enhance BC Hydro’s operating capability in the Vancouver region.