Mining is often referenced as a uniquely opportune enterprise for 5G and private networks development, and Ericsson and AT&T are collaborating on multiple projects in the sector.
Five use cases stand out as particularly impactful for efficiency and value creation in the sector, according to Ericsson, including: autonomous vehicles; remote operations; monitoring and tracking; video services; and hazard and maintenance sensing.
The Swedish vendor’s D-15 lab in Silicon Valley hosted a virtual roundtable with AT&T and others mining connectivity vendors to showcase its vision for a massive digitalization of mining wherein most assets are connected for a range of benefits.
“We’re still early on in this evolution of the 4.0 transformation in mining or manufacturing 4.0, and a lot of industries are struggling to justify some of the investment in technology. In your gut you know you need to transform or your competitor will, but how do you go prove that internally, and you’ve got to prove that internally by justifying the expense,” explained Robert Boyanovsky, VP of mobility and IoT at AT&T Business.
“I don’t think the entire ecosystem is completely put together, but there’s a lot of enablers that are going in the ground now,” he said.
AT&T Says ‘Coverage Is Key’Tim Ledbetter, VP of automation research and development at Epiroc Group’s surface division, said the connectivity requirements in mining are increasing at an exponential rate with a rapid adoption of sensors. However, those sensors need to be connected to reliable, redundant, secure, and low-latency networks to deliver a full return on investment through automation, he explained.
A mission-critical network is what happens when enterprises like mines venture into automation, Ledbetter said. “Dark spots in the network and high latencies, they just will not be tolerated by the state of the art automation systems,” he added.
“None of this works unless you have coverage, and going underground to provide coverage isn’t trivial,” Boyanovsky said.
“When it comes down to it, coverage is key, connectivity to the endpoint is what matters here, and you’ve got to be able to provide that coverage in the strangest locations in the mining business above ground and underground.”
Ambra Solutions CEO Eric L’Heureux highlighted multiple challenges that are unique to mining to explain why mining companies don’t want to be first so much as they want confidence that any new technology has been tested and is working well.
Propagation Challenges Limit Connectivity ChoicesRadio frequency and propagation are the biggest challenges in mining today, he said. “Designing a 5G radio network is completely different in a mine than designing for a public network typically because most of the traffic will be on the upstream.”
The propagation characteristics of a mining network always hinge in spectrum and availability to spectrum in each location, he said.
This is where equipment vendors and service providers need to come together to mix and match infrastructure, services, and software to meet the needs of each respective mining operation, according to the executives assembled for the virtual event.
“We’re very open minded to changing our business model based on what challenges our customer has, either as a managed service type offering or a capital investment,” Boyanovsky said. He also encouraged mining companies to get started with mission-critical capabilities, particularly around the benefits of intelligent situational awareness for worker safety, asset inventory management, and predictive maintenance fueled by analytics.
Mining is all about “producing more with less,” and miners can achieve some early wins there by exploring concepts that are proven to achieve those benefits, Boyanovsky explained.
Because every mine is different, network operators and vendors have to approach each customer with a fresh perspective framed around their specific needs, he added.
Why Mines Often Turn to Private Networks“In some cases, you can’t trench fiber in the middle of nowhere, it just costs way too much to go do that for very specific single customers, so you can’t reuse the fiber, and in many cases there aren’t cellular networks out there,” Boyanovsky said. “You’ve got to handle each of these one at a time, understanding what is there from a macro perspective, are the fiber assets there or not, and then perhaps you roll in a completely private network for the customer.”
AT&T has, for some customers, engineered cellular radio access network (RAN) systems in and around the environment and connected that back to its primary network, but those technology decisions are based on the circumstances of each mine.
Making these determinations is a complex exercise for mines, but it’s something every enterprise has to work through at the outset, according to Boyanovsky. These decisions about connectivity requirements — private on-premises, macro, or a blending of the two — and the extent to which a mine needs to connect its data to the outside world, translate directly into operational business cases, he explained.
“More and more of our customers are looking at localizing their network and maintaining complete privacy and control. If the data coming off the devices doesn’t need to go back outside the four walls, then it shouldn’t,” Boyanovsky said. That provides a closed-loop system that’s secure with latency of 10 milliseconds or less, and that’s why many mines are adopting that model, he said.
“When you think about that, you’ve got endpoints and access points that are all self-contained, and your edge compute platform, the server infrastructure sitting there, gives you that security and that performance that you’re looking for,” Boyanovsky said. “Then when it comes to the cloud, it can really be public or private. And so if that application data is getting crunched locally, and there’s a security posture that’s got zero tolerance to it, you’ll want to put that cloud, likely a private cloud, sitting on premise alongside the edge compute box.”