Gold major Newmont says reliable 5G teleremote dozer control could be used on a fleet of up to a dozen machines to extend productivity and safety gains from the technology.
The company is using an Ericsson Private 5G radio network to connect dozers over a circa-2.5km tailings storage dam construction work-front at its major Cadia gold-copper operation in New South Wales, Australia, reportedly achieving up to 175Mbps uplink throughput with “zero interruptions from communications instability or outages”.
Newmont said it was previously unable to connect more than two machines at distances of no more than 100m on Wi-Fi before the network and machines became unusable. It said Wi-Fi instability could see troubleshooting and efforts to restabilise connectivity impact half of a 12-hour shift at a time.
Chris Twaddle, Newmont director of process control, networks and operational cellular, said the new 5G network was a stepping stone to the company’s “long-term digital transformation vision to use 5G for smart mining at our tier one surface and underground mines globally”.
Manish Tiwari, Ericsson’s head of enterprise 5G, said: “The deployment with Newmont at Cadia demonstrates the power of 5G for industry, where Ericsson’s industry-leading radio portfolio can reduce the amount of infrastructure that needs to be deployed and operated to cover an industrial site or area. This also allows enterprises to use private 5G networks they own to achieve high levels of performance for advanced video-based control and computer vision initiatives without large amounts of spectrum. This is especially valuable to organisations that are operating in spectrum-constrained markets.”
