Mineral exploration near the Arctic Circle gobbles resources and demands intensive logistical planning. Extreme conditions limit the active search season to the summer months, when temperatures hover near freezing. This unpopulated tundra region remains accessible only by helicopter.
Canadian Royalties, Inc. ( www.canadianroyalties.com) conducts its fieldwork at 65 degrees latitude near Hudson Bay. Each summer, this mining firm must service a small army of prospectors in its search for deposits of nickel, copper, platinum, and palladium.
Canadian’s legacy satellite communications network costs roughly $40,000 a month. Too many voice packets were being routed across the satellite and not stored on the ground. Adding to the camp’s inefficiency, its UHF radio network afforded no privacy for employees.
“When you wanted to talk to the next camp, everyone could hear what everyone else was saying over the radio,” says Glen Schlyter, Operations Manager at Canadian Royalties. “So we used the radio only for essential communications.”
Early in 2004, Schlyter’s biggest concern was improving communications at Canadian Royalties’ principal project, the Raglan South Nickel Project in the Nunavik region of northern Québec. Canadian Royalties had been exploring the area since 2001, building out a base camp and three smaller, decentralized operating camps.
Seeking to cut costs and limit employees’ sense of isolation from the outside world, Schlyter turned to RAMTelecom (www. ramtelecom.net), a seasoned hand at providing scalable carrier-class satellite communications to mining, oil and gas, forestry, and government clients in Canada’s remote north.
Canadian Royalties needed the voice capability of a typical corporate campus–only spread across 1,000 square kilometers of frozen tundra. Factor in the polar bears and wandering herds of caribou, and Schlyter faced a unique set of challenges for building a reliable voice network.
Inside the camps, Schlyter and his team had to lay steel-ar-mored cable on the ground. With 500 feet of solid permafrost, digging simply wasn’t an option. The steel cladding on the cable was to keep out the Arctic fox kits.
“They chew anything they can find. They love chewing plastic and fiber optics,” Schlyter says.
Schlyter hoped to offer personnel the convenience of placing
and receiving voice calls as well as voice mail. The system would use VoIP on the ground, with satellite providing the transport link to the outside world.
The system, “needed to be compact, easy to transport, and easy to configure. It also needed to work with very little or no maintenance,” says Gilles Desmarais, Vice President and General Manager at RAMTelecom.
RAMTelecom picked the TalkSwitch ( www.talkswitch.com) voice system for Schlyter, who installed it at base camp. RAMTelecom recommended a complete voice system built around the TalkSwitch 48-CVA, a hybrid VoIP and PSTN telephone system. The camps were connected by point-to-point radio, while a TalkSwitch TS100 telephone was added at each extension location.
Schlyter describes the results as immediate, cutting communication costs by 50 percent between the camps and the head office in Val d’Or, Québec.
“It’s important because it allows personnel in each camp to be able to share information about work progress and results with their colleagues in the other camps,” he says.
Schlyter has even pushed the TalkSwitch telephones into the temporary rough camps, advance forward positions consisting mostly of plywood shacks and prospector tents. The remote outposts now better coordinate the daily flow of groceries, people, fuel, and rock samples getting shuttled back and forth by the helicopter.
“When we used to order food, no one was bothering to check if the next camp had 500 pounds of butter or not,” says Schlyter. “It was highly inefficient.”
The new system provided an added bonus as well–a competitive advantage with hiring and retaining workers. More expensive specialists such as geophysicists now only have to be called away from home and into the field when the samples are promising, while overall employee morale surged due to the increased ability to call home. Schlyter says that over the summer season, the amount of personal call time surges as crew members get increasingly homesick.
One of the bunkhouses even has a plywood phone booth around their TalkSwitch phone for privacy.
“It’s self policing,” Schlyter says. “When someone goes over their 10 minutes, people start to tap on the glass.” V
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