A mine is the hardest site a wireless network will meet. Open pits, kilometres of tunnel, metal, dust, blasting and machinery that has to be driven remotely — and no public coverage underground. The network has to be engineered to the mine and keep running when the surface link is cut.
The mine — open pit above, tunnels below, with haul trucks, shearers and roadheaders moving through it — had no usable public coverage and could not get it. Underground there is none at all; across the pit it is intermittent, and neither carries the capacity, latency or safety guarantees mining needs.
A private 5G network answers that by building a full cellular network to the mine: high-power radios for the pit, low-power radios through the tunnels, an on-premises core so traffic and control stay on-site, and managed devices on everything that moves.
The programme is a coverage-and-integration problem — survey the pit and the workings, place radios that hold coverage as rock and machines block them, and tie the network into the mine's monitoring, positioning and remote-control systems — not a product to install.
Stated before any of them had an answer.
Tunnels have no public signal at all and the pit only patches of it; coverage had to be engineered to the mine, through rock and around moving machinery.
Shearers, roadheaders and haul trucks are controlled from the surface, so the network had to carry real-time control with deterministic latency and no dropped links.
Personnel and vehicle positioning underground is a safety requirement, which means the network is also the locating system.
Residency and continuity required an on-premises core so the mine keeps running — and keeps people safe — when the link to the surface fails.
The coverage and the on-premises core are marked because they are why a site runs its own 5G at all: coverage it engineers, and control and data it keeps.
The scope of the work, rather than a capability list.
Rarely the subsystem that sounds difficult.
Modelling coverage on a map is easy; keeping it through tunnels that bend and as machinery blocks the path is the survey work that takes the time.
Remote-controlling a shearer or a haul truck leaves no room for jitter or a dropped link; the slice and the radio design have to guarantee it.
Underground, the network is part of the safety system — positioning, comms, ventilation — so its reliability is argued, not assumed.
The value only appears when the network feeds the dispatch, monitoring and safety systems the mine already runs, and those integrations are where the schedule goes.
Wireless across the surface and through the workings, engineered to the mine's geometry rather than inherited from a carrier.
Deterministic, low-latency control for shearers, roadheaders and haul trucks, with people moved away from the face.
Personnel and vehicle positioning on the same network, as a safety-grade capability.
An on-premises core and local breakout, so the mine keeps operating and keeps people safe when the surface link fails.
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Wi-Fi cannot hold seamless mobility or guaranteed latency for machines moving through tunnels, and legacy leaky-feeder systems are narrowband and closed. Private 5G engineers coverage to the mine, carries remote control and positioning with guaranteed service, and keeps control and data on-site.
Yes, with an on-premises core and local breakout. Comms, positioning and control stay up on-site, which underground is a safety requirement, not just a convenience.
Yes — with a dedicated low-latency slice and radios placed to hold coverage through the workings. Remote-controlling shearers, roadheaders and haul trucks is one of the main reasons a mine runs its own 5G.
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