Finland’s Nokia has announced it is teaming up with Chilean telecom Claro Chile to equip the Salares Norte mine, operated by South African miner Gold Fields, with a high-perfor-mance private wireless network.
“The solution will support the automation of mining operations by us-ing different applications, such as remote-controlled trucks, excava-tors, drills and, in the future, drones,” the tech company said in a statement.
Under the plan, Nokia’s private LTE/4.9G network is to allow Claro Chile to make operations at the mine safer, more efficient and pro-ductive.
Francisco Guzmán, the director of Claro, commented that “by deploy-ing ultra-reliable, high-performance, low-latency networks, we'll be able to deliver the best tools and connectivity to support the develop-ment of mining 4.0, which is focused on digitizing its operations”.
Based in Johannesburg, Gold Fields says it has total attributable an-nual gold-equivalent production of 2.2 million oz, attributable gold-equivalent mineral reserves of 51.3m million oz, and mineral re-sources of 115.7 million oz.