For most of us, it’s remarkable enough to access the Internet from a plane 10,000 meters in the air. But when Swedish process-control engineer Ulf Olsson does that – as he did recently while flying over Arizona – he’s also monitoring an iron-ore drill 1,000 meters below the earth’s surface in northern Sweden, thanks to underground Wi-Fi.
While cities like Philadelphia wait for citywide Wi-Fi networks to come on line, the world’s iron, coal, and copper mines are getting fat wireless broadband pipes. By early next year, the mine in Kiruna, Sweden – 150 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle – will complete its installation of Wi-Fi-linked drills. A German mining company, Deutsche Steinkohle, is installing several hundred Wi-Fi hot spots in its coal mines. So is a copper mine in Chile called El Teniente, which claims to be the world’s largest.
Miners aren’t blogging from the tunnels – yet. In Kiruna, information from drills and trucks – such as their positions and the weight of their loads – is relayed via wireless base stations to a computer in a control room above ground. (Weight is an important datum; it tells the operator how good the ore is. The heavier the better.) With Wi-Fi networks, fewer miners have to face the risks of working underground – and those who do have a more durable link to the outside.
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