Wireless solution supports underground and open-pit mines

Owner of the world's largest open-pit copper mine, Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation, has begun rolling out a wireless communication platform to support its mining operations across the globe.

A wholly owned subsidiary of Rio Tinto, the company is implementing a wireless solution to support both underground and open-pit mines.

The solution has been developed by Mine Site Technologies (MTS) in partnership with Rajant Corporation, a wireless solutions provider.

Headquartered in Sydney, MST has an established relationship with Rajant utilising its BreadCrumb system in a number of successful mine installations around the world.

MST will work with Rajant on wireless feasibility studies, site surveys, aerial mine photography (unmanned aerial vehicles-UAVs), installation, training, maintenance, and operation of BreadCrumb networks.

Rajant's senior vice president of mining, Gary Anderson, said the Rajant network is composed of BreadCrumb devices that form a wireless, meshed, self-healing network for fleet dispatch, health monitoring and other critical mining applications.

"Many devices that require wireless communications are constantly on the move throughout the mining network," Anderson said.

"The Rajant network's BreadCrumb nodes can rapidly adapt to any changes in the network topology, assuring that IP traffic uptime and bandwidth are maximized."

MST vice president, Mike Foletti, said it is hard to find any other technology that can handle the harsh mining environment as well as the Rajant solution.

Foletti said the partnership will extend to the development of more solutions specifically for the mining industry.

He said MST solutions are installed in over 350 mines in Australia, China, the United States, Canada, Chile, Tanzania, Mexico and Sweden.

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