EBSA is headquartered in Tunja, a city in the state of Boyaca in Colombia, very high (2782 meters above sea level) in the Andes Mountains. The EBSA project was developed in order to get SCADA data from the electrical substations into a new Central Control Room. Siemens, responsible for the overall network, turned to ANDESwireless Ltda to provide the necessary networking switches and consulting for the project.

ANDESwireless’ challenge was to create a substation-hardened network that offered redundancy in the event of a fault. The overall networking area consisted of fourteen substations spread throughout EBSA.

As shown in the diagram below, most of the substations were many kilometers apart--with the greatest networking distance between any two substations at 92.5 kilometers.

Additionally,the fourteen substations were subject to harsh electrical,thermal, and environmental conditions.