6G, Nokia and the mine of the future

Nokia is pushing ahead on its work to provide private networking hardware and software for the mine of the future, said the company at last week's Brooklyn 6G Summit. Nokia is starting its work with the multi-national mining company Vale in Brazil.

To be accurate, Nokia's work will really start with private 5G, rather than 6G, because 6G services won't be available until 2030. But participants at the Brooklyn 6G Summit want to get a jump on the latest 3GPP technology.

Lelio Di Martino, general manager of the cognitive digital mine (CDM) venture at Nokia, told Fierce that Nokia is working with several other pit operators as well as Vale on the CDM project - the mine of the future, but he didn’t want to name those other mining companies yet.

Asad Khan, research director of 5G and wireless networks at SNS Telecom & IT, said, “We know Nokia has recently been working with Australian iron ore mining operation Roy Hill on artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. Other possibilities include but are not limited to BHP, Rio Tinto, Boliden, Codelco, Antofagasta, Antamina, MMG and Sigma Lithium."

These are the kinds of mining companies that are working on AI and automation software and hardware for mining-specific private networking. Khan agreed that operators mining iron ore, as well as minerals such as lithium, are driving the move to a more digitally optimized and automated mine environment.

Nokia's R&D down the mine

Nokia’s Di Martino said that the vendor is currently doing research and development work with Vale and the other unnamed pit operators on what mines will look like down the line. “This research is focused on identifying the technological roadmap for the mine of the future,” Di Martino said. “There is a huge effort from all the big miners in the world to understand what we’ll be mining in the next 30 or 40 years."

To this end, the initial work takes in technology installed on autonomous trucks and drillers that operate just outside the mine, as well as sensors installed inside a pit itself. The project involves creating digital twins - a virtual representation of every aspect of a physical object - for mining operations. As well as management for operations and safety.

The work that Nokia has already done with Vale on the mine on the edge of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, which is the largest iron ore mine in the world, has already started a lot of autonomous operations using data to develop 3D maps of the mine. “We have some models that can tell you if you deploy your truck within this area you get a 99% chance that it works as expected,” Di Martino said. The R&D work could take 3 or 4 years overall.

Obviously, this is not the same as the pipe-dream of a robotaxi navigating a rush hour San Francisco street. The truck would likely be the only vehicle traveling along the proscribed route, but the road conditions, particularly on the edge of a rainforest, would be important. Potholes and the like would need be monitored and detected so that trucks could cover the same routes every day without being stopped.

Clearly, Nokia is not the only company working on the 5G/6G private networking problem. Dell’Oro ranks the Chinese vendor Huawei with the leading private networking share in the world because it serves its large 5G standalone domestic enterprise market, followed by Nokia and then Ericsson.