5 Cost-Effective Ways to Protect the Performance of your Wireless Network
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As covered in previous blogs, the performance of a mine’s wireless network typically decreases with time. This is caused by a number of factors, but one of the most common is a lack of dedicated personnel. It’s often someone’s part-time job to ‘keep the network up and running’.
Initially this may be fine, but over the course of time leads to a network with a design that creeps from the original intentions, and whose performance is unsustainable.
The good news is that maintaining performance of your wireless network doesn’t necessarily require hiring and managing a full time on-site team.
Instead, and depending on the criticality of your network, the 5 following tips will help you ensure uptime of your network without the need to in-source full time network administration personnel.
The story of how a simple mis-configuration can crash your high performing network
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Through this blog, we will discuss a recent and interesting emergency call from one of our customers at a large surface mine, highlighting the importance of proactive monitoring of your wireless network and implementation of a proper process around configuration management.
This customer, which is a large, well-connected and technologically advanced mine, had started noticing sudden network performance degradation, which appeared out of the blue on what had been an otherwise high-performing network.
The challenges of maintaining your ‘Digital Mine’ connected
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Experience has shown time and time again that – despite the best of intentions – our customers’ wireless networks are often neglected after deployment. The combination of multiple teams relying on it for access to their critical data (dispatch, maintenance, high precision GPS, operator safety, etc.) and a lack of accountability as to whom is responsible for its performance and maintenance often results in a network with performance and reliability that degrades over time.
Compounding that, as applications are added in response to the needs of the mine’s teams, and as utilization of the network increases in response, performance degradation begins to happen at an exponential rate. Wireless networks become slow and unresponsive, time to resolve issues increases, and the value that the network adds begins to drop steeply as the cost (and pain) of maintaining it grows.
If this describes your experiences with your wireless network, the good news is that you’re not alone -and a proper understanding of your pain points will ensure you can now engage the support you need.
Let’s review some of the typical pain points we see in the field.
