Open-pit phosphate mine on Celona private 5G

An open-pit phosphate producer wanted to put modern connected-worker tools in its people’s hands across the whole operation — an open-pit mine roughly 30 feet deep and a steel-and-concrete processing plant beside it. Together the two cover about 0.6 square miles, roughly 290 football fields, and between the open sky of the pit and the dense steel and concrete of the plant, it’s about as hard an RF environment as connectivity gets. Existing connectivity couldn’t keep workers reliably online across both.

One private 5G layer, four APs

Rather than blanket the site with dozens of Wi-Fi access points and the cabling to support them, Celona covered the entire operation — pit and plant — with just four outdoor AP11 access points. Private cellular’s transmit power and link budget carry into the open pit and punch through the plant’s steel and concrete far better than Wi-Fi per access point. The network dropped straight into the customer’s existing enterprise network, and devices onboard by eSIM, provisioned automatically through the customer’s mobile device management (MDM) — so adding a device is zero-touch, with no separate network to manage.

What the workforce runs on it

More than 100 devices — iPads, iPhones, and Dell laptops, with around 50 active at a time — now run their day-to-day tools over private 5G: video conferencing on FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, safety applications, web-based ArcGIS mapping, and network printing. The same coverage supports real-time video analysis, so an expert off-site can see what a worker sees and help troubleshoot in the moment.

The outcome

Workers stay connected everywhere on site, which shows up as better efficiency and, importantly, better safety — real-time video and reliable comms mean problems get seen and solved faster, and help is one call away anywhere in the pit or plant. All of it runs on four APs the IT team manages centrally, with no civil works to cover the site.