Largest Underground Digital Communication System
27 February 2008
Mine Site Technologies is very excited to announce the installation of our largest ImPact Underground Digital Communication system to date, at Dahongshan Copper Mine. With the demand for copper so strong within their domestic Chinese market, the engineers at Dahongshan set out to upgrade the mine with the latest technology to increase productivity to much higher levels. Their detailed review highlighted the need to establish a high quality, high bandwidth, communication highway within the mine to optimize their investment in mining machinery and their workforce.
Dahongshan Copper Mine is part of Yunnan Copper Group which is the 2nd largest producer of copper in China. With an annual production of 3 million tons in 2006 and production planned to increase to 6 million tons in 2008, it is one of the largest individual copper mines in China.
Dahongshan engineers reviewed a range of communication technologies before deciding that digital, 802.11 based Wi-Fi offered the greatest scope for the meeting the mine's requirements now and for future expansion. They approached MST after reviewing our ImPact Underground Communication System and assessing its use at mining operations in Canada, USA, and Australia.
The initial ImPact Digital Mine system consists of:
- 76 ImPact access point/fibre switches
- 24km of MST's composite fibre/power cable
- 100 VoIP Phones
- 200 AeroScout 802.11 RFID Tags
- 65 IP video cameras
Key reasons for choosing MST's ImPact System instead of the more traditional leaky feeder type underground radio systems, included:
- ImPact provides the platform/infrastructure for having VoIP, Tracking, IP Video, and a lot more in one system – something leaky feeder and other communication systems cannot match, plus it has much more capacity for expansion
- The engineers wanted to implement cutting edge communication technology to their underground mining environment
- Mine Site's extensive experience in implementing such system around the world
We are extremely honored to be chosen by Dahongshan Mine after such extensive investigations and it is a real credit to our Manager for China, Francis Kan, to work with Dahongshan in addressing their technical requirements in such detail.
We look forward to working with the Dahonghshan group to bring the benefits of digital communications to their other mining operations. As one person said to Francis: "While others are talking about installing digital communication and messaging systems, MST is actually doing it, and that is what we need."
