Anglo-Russian gold miner Polymetal has commissioned Russian mobile operator Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) and Ericsson to create a 5G-ready dedicated industrial network at Polymetal’s gold mine at Nezhdaninskoye in the Russian Federal Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the far north east of Siberia.

The network will be introduced at the end of 2020 and be built on Ericsson’s Dedicated Networks solution. It will provide both critical communications infrastructure and a dedicated Industrial IoT network.

Together with Ericsson, MTS will build what will be the first commercial Private LTE network in Russia for remote monitoring and managing critical processes in difficult geographic and weather conditions. The new network will also become Russia’s first 5G-ready Private network. The Sakha Republic is the largest sub-national entity in the world, and covers the coldest and most ice covered regions of the Northern Hemisphere. MTS has already implemented a number of pilot projects with Russian firms and has deployed Private LTE and 5G-ready networks in various industrial scenarios.

With Ericsson Dedicated Networks solution, which complies with the 3GPP standards and includes a full-fledged carrier-grade network core, MTS and Polymetal will be enabled to use all the carrier grade packet network functions for Polymetal’s own industrial and commercial applications.

The solution supports 4G and 5G Non-Standalone simultaneously and allows dual-mode core capability to support 5G New Radio Standalone.

The deployment of the Private LTE network as a single high-speed platform for various technological needs will enable MTS to significantly increase the speed of transferring large amounts of information, the fault tolerance of the private network and also reduce its maintenance cost. This will be of particular benefit when dealing with the harsh climatic conditions and constantly changing mountainous terrain.