Nokia has partnered with Vivo,
Brazil’s leading telecommunications company, to provide private LTE
wireless services for Vale’s Carajas iron mine. The Vivo-operated
service will be part of Vale’s Industry 4.0 project, deploying
autonomous drill platforms and trucks to increase mine productivity and
improve worker safety. The network will be also used for mine-wide
communications between workers.
“Nokia is making a lot of impact
in the mining sector right now, and this project with Vale is a very
important beginning here in Brazil. Our industrial-grade private LTE
wireless solution is ideal for supporting the industry’s embrace of
autonomous technologies. It solves a lot of issues that past wireless
technologies have struggled with and opens the way for many new and
exciting use cases for mines of the future,” Luiz Tonisi, head of the
Brazil market unit at Nokia, said in a release.
According to Nokia, its mobile
LTE and 5G technologies provide more reliable support than older WiMax
or Wi-Fi systems for operating and controlling trucks and drills. The
company’s private industrial-grade wireless solutions are also
supporting new mining deployments in areas such as environmental
monitoring and video-assisted remote operations.
Based on Nokia’s release, one of
the advantages of LTE is its ability to adjust performance
characteristics to each application and provide a single mine-wide
wireless communications platform.
“The private wireless service we
are implementing at Vale’s Carajas mine is one of many deployments that
we expect to see in the next few years. Forward-thinking customers such
as Vale are embracing Industry 4.0 technologies, fostering digital
solutions at the heart of their businesses, whether in agriculture,
transportation or mining. We are excited to be leading this
transformation,” added Alex Salgado, Vivo’s VP of business-to-business.
Vale currently operates 13
autonomous trucks on a WiMax network at its Brucutu iron mine in Minas
Gerais, Brazil, which it intends to replace with a private LTE network
and is also considering an IoT (internet-of-things) application, which
would connect dam monitoring instruments using LTE.
Nokia is concurrently working
with several mining operators worldwide to deploy private LTE-based
wireless networks, with plans to migrate to 5G in the future.
Source: Canadian Mining Journal) |