2027 Agenda

Seven console manufacturers. Forty existing dispatch positions. One statewide radio network that could not go quiet during the change.

When VELCO, the nation's first statewide transmission-only electric utility, decided in 2024 to replace MPT 1327 analog trunking with DMR Tier III across 56 sites and more than 1,100 subscribers, the dispatch console became the most consequential purchase in the program. It was the one component that had to work with the network being retired as well as the network being built.

This session opens up VELCO's evaluation end to end: how the shortlist was built, what was asked of all seven manufacturers, and why capability matrices and reference sites were not enough to separate them. The deciding test was not a feature comparison. It was whether a vendor would develop and prove a migration path on VELCO's actual network, including writing a radio access protocol from scratch, validating it in the radio manufacturer's lab, and putting an engineer on site in Vermont for a week to find out what would break.

Something did break. A legacy inactivity timer silently killed console patching, and the fix, voice activity detection, only surfaced because the testing was real.

Anyone holding a communications modernization budget will leave with VELCO's evaluation criteria, the questions that produced honest answers from vendors, and a look at the deployment now underway: around 60 positions, a redundant core, gateways, location services, and IoT.