Water channels can be observed in different applications: management of drinking water, sewer system, copper mining industry etc. In particular their study is relevant for agriculture where improved water level control and reduced losses due to perturbations (such as water off-takes) is increasingly relevant when facing more frequent droughts. A particular challenge when dealing with water canals (as water channels are called in agriculture) is usually the long distances involved. This force us to explicitly consider the communication hardware involved in the control solution. Thus, we study the effect on performance and stability of the control solution of some features related to communication channels such as: noise, delay, loss of information packets and variable gain. These four features are considered to be the more relevant and with likely the highest impact. The simulation results presented here are a first step in building a more informed experimental setting in the near future, possibly followed by large scale real life testing. © 2011 IEEE.