Zero Downtime for Autonomous Mining Operations

Mavenir’s Private Network Solution for Continuous Mining

Mavenir, a trusted source by many of the world’s largest mobile network operators, is partnering with customers to deliver a highly reliable connectivity solution that helps achieve the goal of zero downtime for autonomous mining operations.

Need for reliable connectivity for autonomous mining operations

Mining operations need to run smoothly and economically with negligible or zero downtime to succeed and be highly profitable.

Unreliable voice or data connectivity, high latency, and slow throughput make autonomous mining operations undependable, insecure, and impact revenue. Suppose autonomous vehicle operations fail due to unpredictable network downtimes or loss of connectivity to the vehicle. In that case, the entire site comes to a halt, stopping operations and costing the mining company valuable revenue.

Availability and reliable connectivity are the key areas of opportunity and improvement for mining operations

The use of autonomous drills and vehicles is gaining widespread acceptance. Autonomous operations not only improve profitability by increasing productivity but also improve the lives of mining workers with connectivity, safety, and training. Implementing autonomous haulage across mining operations makes sense, but continuous operation and ultra-reliable connectivity are critical to making the process productive, profitable, and safe.

Mavenir’s Private Network Solution for Continuous Mining

This continuous mining  solution includes Mavenir’s proven Converged Packet Core, Open vRAN, Cloud-Native IMS, and the 5G OpenBeam®radio portfolio. Together they are designed on a fully software-based, open, 100% cloud-native, services-based architecture. This solution delivers varied capabilities needed for the mining industry (Figure 1).

• The Mavenir solution keeps vehicles continuously connected to a central data center. Autonomous vehicles transmit their location, direction, and speed several times each second, enabling acute situational awareness.
• Reliable session continuity depends on redundancy across data centers to safeguard the connected vehicles and the employees who work in the area. The Mavenir architecture and design, which ensures a failover recovery time of fewer than five seconds, is so instantaneous that no manual intervention is needed.
• Should network issues occur, the vehicles remain connected to one of the data centers, unaware of an issue, and experience no downtime.
• This inherently open, flexible, and cloud-native solution ensures the high bandwidth, low latency, and high reliability critical to session continuity, thus enabling all mining sites’ safe and smooth operation.
• The solution enables a low-touch, flexible path to 5G with minimal risk, improved speed, security, and reliability.

Mining companies are committed to improving operations and keeping workers safe. Mavenir’s mining solutions can help the mining industry make data and voice communications reliable, manage multiple connected sites, synchronize data, and have centralized network provisioning and management.

As an example, a major Australian mining company has been using Mavenir’s Private Network Solution for Continuous Mining for its autonomous fleet. This growing company has improved operational efficiency, hauled billions of tons of material, and doubled productivity in less than two years.

Mavenir’s Private Network Solution for Continuous Mining is helping customers deploy dependable networks that minimize the impact of failure, protect revenue, and make the mining industry safer, sustainable, more autonomous, and efficient.