A number of companies, including Tigo Colombia, Nokia, Epiroc, Sandvik and OSC Top solutions have teamed up with AngloGold Ashanti Colombia to conduct the first underground 5G mining trial in Jerico, Colombia. Four mining use cases were tested as part of the trial including mission-critical communications, the remote teleoperation of vehicles, mining machinery and inspection and monitoring with drones and high-definition cameras.
Nokia says it deployed an ‘industrial grade’ 5G private wireless network using equipment from its AirScale 5G portfolio, which delivered transmission speeds in excess of 1Gbps, despite the ‘challenging underground environment’. The network was supported by Tigo Colombia, which was using a block of 3.5GHz spectrum band issued by the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications (Ministerio de Tecnologias de la Informacion y las Comunicaciones, MinTIC) under its 5G testing framework.