Mexico City Water Network Sectorisation and Telemetry
Mexico City's water utility has been carving its distribution network into roughly 830 metered sectors since 2019, fitting macro-meters, control valves and pressure regulators so leaks can be isolated and pressure managed. It reported 484 sectors finished by August 2022, 58 percent of the plan, and the goal of covering the whole city by 2024 was missed. Telemetry and SCADA stations watch wells, tanks and pumping plants, and residents can look up their neighbourhood's water source and rationing schedule online. What the city does not publish is the measurements themselves: a promised public dashboard of network readings, due at the end of 2022, never appeared.
484 of the roughly 847 planned hydraulic sectors were built by August 2022, 58 percent of the programme, for 955.5 million pesos, which the utility credited with recovering 550 litres per second across seven boroughs. Sacmex has repeatedly put losses at around 40 percent of supply. A 2023 PLOS Water study surveying 2,595 residents found 73 percent of households in the five eastern boroughs receive water only intermittently, averaging 87 hours a week, and 61 percent had suffered an outage in the previous three years.
🎓 Lesson
Cutting a network into metered sectors only pays if the sectors are then operated and the readings are published. Mexico City has built more than half of them, still loses roughly 40 percent of its water by its own account, and gives residents a schedule lookup instead of the data.
Evidence🔬 Peer-reviewed
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Cost≈955.5M MXN on sectorisation to Aug 2022; ≈19bn MXN city water and drainage budget for 2026
FundingMexico City government budget
Sources
↗ La Razón — sectorisation at 58 percent (30 Aug 2022)'Se han concluido 484 de los 847 sectores' previstos para 2024, con una inversión de 955 millones de pesos ('484 of the 847 sectors planned for 2024 have been completed', 955 million pesos invested). Same piece: 'Para finales de ese año se preveía un portal de acceso público con mediciones principales de la ciudad' ('a public portal with the city's main measurements was expected by the end of that year') — that portal was not found in 2026. Most other sources give the plan total as 830, not 847.
↗ Excélsior — telemetry stations rehabilitated and added (30 Apr 2024)'Rehabilitación de 35 estaciones de medición y telemetría, así como la implementación de 30 nuevas estaciones' ('rehabilitation of 35 measurement and telemetry stations, plus 30 new stations'), a 30 million peso investment permitting real-time monitoring. The same article's figure of 9,270 litres per second recovered covers wells, springs and pumping plants generally and is deliberately not used here.
↗ El Universal — 2026 water budget funds metering, automation and telemetry (15 Dec 2025)19 billion pesos for water and drainage in 2026, an increase of 26.7 percent; the works contemplate 'medición, automatización y telemetría' to 'incrementar la eficiencia de la infraestructura hidráulica' ('metering, automation and telemetry' to 'increase the efficiency of the hydraulic infrastructure'). Evidence the programme is still live and funded.
↗ Almomento — 2026 Plan Hídrico, leak repair and buried-pipe survey (18 Feb 2026)'Triplicar la reparación de fugas, lo que permitiría recuperar 300 litros por segundo' ('triple leak repairs, which would allow 300 litres per second to be recovered') and 'inteligencia satelital y georradar terrestre, capaces de supervisar 800 kilómetros de infraestructura subterránea' ('satellite intelligence and ground-penetrating radar, able to survey 800 kilometres of underground infrastructure'). Strongest recent source on current state.
↗ Sacmex/Segiagua — 'Agua en tu colonia' supply-schedule portal (operator)Public lookup returning a neighbourhood's water source and scheduled supply hours. The page is a JavaScript single-page app and served no readable content to an automated fetch; existence and function corroborated by press coverage below. It publishes schedules, not measurements, and offers no download or API.
↗ Milenio — Sacmex puts network losses at 40 percent'CdMx pierde 40 por ciento de agua por fugas en redes, revela Sacmex' ('Mexico City loses 40 percent of its water to network leaks, Sacmex reveals'). The figure is the utility's own, reported consistently by El Universal, Crónica and Aristegui Noticias since 2015; it is attributed here rather than asserted. Note: the city's own indicator portal (indicadores.cdmx.gob.mx) is reported to record 52.19 percent unaccounted-for water for 2022, a materially higher figure, but that page returned HTTP 503 on every attempt during review and the number is therefore not used.
↗ Huberts et al., PLOS Water (2023) — household costs of intermittent supplyPeer-reviewed. '73% of surveyed households in those five boroughs reported receiving water intermittently', 'with an average of 87 hours a week, or roughly 12 hours a day'; '61% of surveyed households reported having experienced an outage of their water supply in the last three years'. Survey of 2,595 individuals in Gustavo A. Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Iztacalco, Iztapalapa and Tláhuac.
↗ El Universal — Congress approves replacing Sacmex with Segiagua'Con 65 votos a favor se avalaron cambios al Artículo 16 de la Constitución capitalina' so that 'el Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de México (Sacmex) pasará a ser la Secretaría de Gestión Integral del Agua' ('with 65 votes in favour, changes to Article 16 of the city constitution were approved' so that Sacmex 'will become the Secretariat for Integrated Water Management'). The change was completed in December 2025; Segiagua is the operator today, Sacmex the name under which most of this work was done.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Mexico City Water Network Sectorisation and Telemetry” — Mexico City, Mexico. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/mexico-city-water-monitoring/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
