Mining

Networks, CCTV and fleet tracking for remote pits, where dust, heat, generator power and lightning decide what survives.

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What makes this sector hard

The pit is hours from the nearest fiber. The link back to head office in Vientiane is usually microwave, satellite, or both.
Fine dust gets into every fan and filter. Office-grade switches in an unsealed cabinet often fail within the first dry season.
Power comes from generators, and long outdoor cable runs pick up lightning surges in the rainy season. Both kill power supplies and switch ports long before they wear out.
Diesel and haul-truck hours are where money leaks. Without GPS and fuel sensors, nobody can say where 200 litres went last night.
Entry to blasting areas, the processing plant and explosives stores must be controlled and logged in a system, not written in a gate book.
The camp needs usable internet after shift. If it doesn't get it, people plug their own routers into the office network.

Reference IT design

Get a link out of the pit first

Start with the path back to Vientiane, because every other system depends on it. Where carrier fiber reaches the nearest district town, we run a microwave or point-to-point wireless hop from there into the site, with a satellite terminal beside it as backup. SD-WAN keeps ERP, voice and camera alarms on the better link and pushes bulk traffic, like updates and video export, onto whatever is left.

Survey the path in the dry season, but design for the wet one. Higher microwave bands lose signal in heavy tropical rain, and trees can grow into the Fresnel zone within a single season. Long hops need fade margin to spare.

Inside the site

Industrial switches rated for −40 to 75 °C, in IP65/IP66 cabinets with filtered fans. Where dust is heavy, a sealed cabinet with a heat exchanger lasts longer.
Fiber between the office, processing plant and weighbridge. Use non-metallic (dielectric) cable so a lightning strike on the haul road doesn't travel into the rack. Any copper run that leaves a building gets surge protection at both ends.
VLANs for office, OT/plant, cameras, guests and camp. The camp gets its own internet breakout and bandwidth cap, so a big football night doesn't take down the weighbridge.
Outdoor Wi-Fi for the camp and workshops.

Security, cyber and physical

Next-generation firewalls at head office and every site, joined by encrypted VPN. Remote access only through MFA.
EDR on laptops and servers.
Backups in three places: site, Vientiane and cloud.
Dust- and weather-rated IP CCTV at weighbridges, fuel tanks, ore stockpiles and gates, with AI video analytics for restricted-zone intrusion and missing PPE.
License plate recognition at gates and weighbridges. For access control and time attendance we recommend face readers; fingerprint readers struggle with dirty or worn fingers.

Fleet, fuel and sensors

GPS fleet tracking on trucks and heavy equipment, with fuel-level sensors on the tanks that matter.
IoT temperature and humidity sensors in server rooms and cabinets, alerting Vientiane before anything overheats.

Power

Online (double-conversion) UPS in every cabinet and server room. Line-interactive units tend to keep jumping to battery when generator frequency drifts, and wear the batteries out early.
Earthing and lightning protection that has been measured, not assumed.
A small server or HCI on site so critical systems keep running when the WAN is down.
24/7 network monitoring from Vientiane.

If the budget is tight, this is our order

Order	What	Why
1	Backup link and online UPS	Without them, cameras and ERP are dead weight
2	Firewall, MFA and three-location backup	Before adding more systems
3	CCTV and GPS at weighbridges and fuel	Where the losses are
4	Spares and a cleaning schedule	Travel from Vientiane takes a day; keep a spare switch, power supply and SFPs on site