MTS announced an agreement with Polymetal, one of the world’s top-10 gold producers, to provide Russia’s first commercial 5G-ready LTE private network.
MTS telecom engineers will build the 5G-ready LTE private network — based on Ericsson’s Dedicated Networks solution — at the Nezhdaninskoye gold deposit in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).
Yuzhno-Verkhoyansk Mining Company, a Polymetal affiliate, plans to leverage the MTS-deployed network for integrated connectivity across IP-telephony, mobile devices, mining dispatching systems, remote and automated equipment control — including for excavators, drilling rigs, and measuring devices — as well as automated fire extinguishing systems and video monitoring.
Georgy Dzhabiev, director of MTS Cloud & Digital Solutions, said: “Our partners from Polymetal have trusted us to build the first commercial Private LTE network in Russia for remote monitoring and managing critical processes in difficult geographic and weather conditions.”
A remote control of drilling rigs and dispatching will be among the first projects based on Private LTE. Currently, at the Nezhdaninsky site, tower antennas and equipment installations are already underway. We’re going to launch the network by the end of 2020
“The deployment of the Private LTE network as a single high-speed platform for various technological needs will allow us to increase the speed of transferring large amounts of information, the fault tolerance of the Private network and reduce its maintenance cost,” said Alexander Laguta, head of Information Technology and Communications department, Yakutsk branch of Polymetal UK.
The network built on the Ericsson Dedicated Networks solution supports 4G and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) simultaneously and allows dual-mode core capability to support 5G New Radio Standalone (5G NR SA).
Ericsson Enterprise Core is a virtualized solution that scales its size to cover a distributed multiregional private network. It needs only two standard x86 servers in 1+1 configuration to process the workloads from 250 to 50,000 sources.
