One of the deepest gold mines in the world has installed a R2.5 million Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) telephony infrastructure to improve the quality and reliability of communications in and around its property.
Tinus Vorster, an electrical engineer at Wesdriefontein Gold Mine, says the new systems replaces an existing mixed digital/analogue arrangement which caused frustrations with its bad switching quality and usage limitations - not least of which was its single point of failure. "If the exchange failed it resulted in a communications breakdown across the entire facility," he explains.
Naturally this was a critical failing. Wesdriefontein sought to address it by installing a distributed Philips SOPHO iS 3000 system to provide the redundancy needed to ensure constant communication - even in the event of an exchange failing. "The new PABX is equipped with automatic re-routing between its seven sites if a link goes down. Users won`t know it has happened," says Vorster.
Explaining the significance of this fail-over functionality on a mine, he says a lack of communication can often be life-threatening. "When you can have hundreds of miners working underground at any one time, a lack of contact with the surface can be fatal," he says.
Vorster describes the new Philips PABX as a vast improvement on its predecessor. "It is now possible to make a call from the stope face to anywhere in the world - functionality which could quite literally save lives."
He also identifies the copper cabling of the old system as a problem, particularly because lightning strikes are common in the area. This susceptibility motivated a switch to fibre optics which was immediately justified when the mine lost only one extension to inclement weather in the first three months of operation.
When asked about the cost of such secure communication, Vorster says the R2.5 million paid for the complete installation - including 8kms of surface cabling and almost as much again of indoor cabling - was cheap at the price.
On the subject of the actual implementation, Vorster says the PABX took three months from order to delivery and a further three months to complete the installation. "Cut-over time for the first exchange at the six shaft was a mere 45 minutes and it took less than two hours to get all seven sites up," he adds.
Leon van Vreden, sales engineer at Philips Business Communications, describes fast implementation as characteristic of the Philips SOPHO range. "As the system is modular by design, it is possible to switch over in small batches of telephone users at a time, making the process a great deal less painful as can sometimes be the case," he says.
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