Last year, I wrote about Newmont's use of Private 5G (P5G) at its Cadia operations in Australia. That deployment provided a particularly good example of where Wi-Fi limitations around coverage, capacity and uplink performance can become a barrier to mining automation. At Cadia, P5G has been used to support demanding applications including underground autonomous equipment and teleremote dozers.
Newmont's Boddington mine in Western Australia provides another interesting perspective on the same journey. A recently published 11-part video series from Fierce Network TV, produced in partnership with Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions, goes inside Boddington to look at autonomous mining and the connectivity infrastructure supporting it. Rather than focusing only on network specifications, the series brings together the mine operators, technology specialists and people working with the autonomous systems.
Boddington is already notable in the mining industry for automation. In 2021, Newmont completed what it described as the gold industry's first fully operational Autonomous Haulage System (AHS), consisting of 36 autonomous haul trucks. Newmont invested US$150 million in the project, with safety and productivity among the main objectives.
What makes the newer video series interesting from a private networks perspective is that it looks beyond the autonomous vehicles themselves and at the communications infrastructure required to keep an increasingly automated mine operating. Mining presents an unusual wireless environment. A factory or warehouse might change its layout occasionally, but an open-pit mine is continuously changing. Pits become deeper, benches and dumps move, haul roads change and the radio environment changes with them. Equipment weighing hundreds of tonnes is meanwhile moving around the site and needs dependable connectivity.
The Fierce Network series describes how Boddington moved away from relying on Wi-Fi towards private cellular connectivity as its automation requirements increased. According to the series, Wi-Fi was unable to provide the consistency of coverage, mobility and reliability required as operations scaled. P5G now supports autonomous haul trucks and drill rigs across the mine.
This is an important distinction when comparing industrial Wi-Fi with private cellular networks. The question is not simply which technology can produce the highest peak data rate. For an autonomous mine, the more important questions are whether connectivity remains available as machines move, whether handovers occur predictably and whether the network can maintain the required service when many machines and applications are operating simultaneously.
An autonomous haul truck does not become autonomous because of 5G. Much of the sensing, positioning, decision-making and machine control takes place on or around the vehicle itself. But the autonomous system still depends heavily on communications for supervision, coordination, telemetry, operational data and interaction with the wider mine management system. This makes the wireless network part of the operational infrastructure rather than simply another way of connecting devices.
That becomes even clearer when looking at the wider autonomous fleet. The videos show not only haul trucks but autonomous drilling equipment and centralised control facilities where people can supervise operations remotely. Fierce notes that these systems generate large quantities of data and require uninterrupted connectivity.
There is an interesting contrast here with the Cadia deployment I covered previously. At Cadia, the limitations of Wi-Fi were particularly visible through measurable network performance. Underground Wi-Fi had been providing around 20 to 30 Mbps uplink, whereas the P5G trial achieved around 90 Mbps through access drives and declines and up to 150 Mbps uplink in extraction drives. More recently, Newmont used P5G for its surface teleremote dozer operations, where reliable uplink capacity is essential because multiple high-quality video feeds have to be sent back to remote operators.
Boddington highlights a slightly different problem: mobility and reliable wide-area coverage across a large and continuously changing surface operation. This is one reason mining has emerged as one of the strongest use cases for private cellular networks. Fewer radio sites can cover considerably larger areas than would normally be practical with Wi-Fi, while cellular mobility mechanisms are designed from the outset to keep devices connected as they move between coverage areas.
Newmont's experience elsewhere illustrates this point. At its Peñasquito mine in Mexico, the company replaced dozens of movable Wi-Fi trailers with six cellular radio towers. Ericsson says the change reduced the operational burden associated with continually relocating communications infrastructure as mining activity moved.
The other important lesson from Boddington is that the value of the private network increases as more applications use it.
The initial business case might centre around autonomous trucks or drills, but once reliable wireless coverage exists across the mine, the same infrastructure can potentially support connected workers, cameras, sensors, machine vision, predictive maintenance, remote operations and other industrial applications.
This is a point that comes up repeatedly with private networks. A network deployed for just one use case can be difficult to justify. A network that becomes a common connectivity platform for multiple operational technologies has a very different value proposition.
Perhaps the most important part of the series, though, concerns people. Automation is sometimes discussed primarily in terms of removing workers from mining operations. The reality presented at Boddington is more nuanced. Removing people from the immediate vicinity of extremely large moving machinery can significantly reduce risk, while remote operation and centralised supervision allow people to work away from hazardous areas.
At the same time, the skills required at the mine are changing. Mechanical and electrical expertise increasingly overlaps with software, communications, networking and automation. Fierce highlights how Boddington is seeing new roles emerge around the autonomous operation while people remain responsible for planning, supervision and decision-making.
It is also important not to attribute every benefit of automation directly to 5G. Boddington's Autonomous Haulage System predates the P5G deployment. Newmont's 36-truck autonomous fleet was fully operational in 2021. The autonomous driving technology, vehicle sensors, mine planning systems and operational processes are all fundamental parts of the overall solution.
What P5G provides is the communications foundation that allows these systems to scale and enables additional connected and autonomous applications to be introduced without continually running into the coverage, mobility and capacity limitations of the previous wireless infrastructure. That is probably the most useful takeaway from The Autonomous Mine series. Private 5G is not the technology making a haul truck autonomous. It is increasingly the connectivity backbone that allows an autonomous mine to operate as a connected system.
My earlier post on Newmont's Cadia deployment showed how the technical characteristics of P5G can overcome specific Wi-Fi performance limitations. Boddington provides the other side of the story: what happens when dependable private cellular connectivity becomes part of the operational infrastructure of a mine.
For anyone interested in private networks, industrial automation or connected mining, the complete The Autonomous Mine series is well worth watching.
Related Posts:
- Private Networks Technology Blog: Newmont Pushes Mining Innovation Forward with Private 5G at Cadia
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