Vertical: Mining
Application: Autonomous haulage, remote equipment control, real-time fleet monitoring, worker safety
Ecosystem: Nokia, Ambra Solutions
Private Network: 4G, 5G
IAMGOLD’s Côté Gold Mine, located in the corridor between Timmins and Sudbury in Ontario, has completed a full overhaul of its communications infrastructure. Working with Ambra Solutions, the mine replaced aging Wi-Fi systems that had long constrained reliability and worker mobility with a purpose-built private 4G/5G network running on Nokia Modular Private Wireless technology. The result is a connectivity backbone that covers the entire operation — surface pit, underground workings, and process plant alike.
The core problem Ambra and IAMGOLD set out to solve was practical: the mine needed a solution with a minimal physical footprint that could handle current automation requirements while leaving room to grow. Legacy wireless approaches, including the leaky-feeder and Wi-Fi systems common across older Canadian hard-rock operations, simply weren’t architected for the data volumes or latency demands that autonomous equipment and real-time monitoring require. The new private network addresses both constraints directly.
With the network in place, Côté Gold can now run autonomous haul trucks and drills, manage its vehicle fleet in real time, issue remote equipment commands, and keep workers better connected — all without relying on public carrier infrastructure. Ambra handled the engineering, architecture, and deployment, while Nokia supplied the private wireless hardware. The division of responsibilities reflects an increasingly common model in industrial private network builds, where a mining-specialist integrator pairs with a major telecom equipment vendor.
Ambra Solutions founder and CEO Éric L’Heureux described the project as “a decisive step for the future of mining operations,” adding that the connectivity provides Côté Gold with “the technological foundations for a mine of the future: automated, secure and capable of evolving at the pace of its ambition.” Nokia North America’s mission critical enterprise head Matthew Young framed the deployment in terms of workforce protection, noting that the new infrastructure gives IAMGOLD “comprehensive, automated connectivity to deliver on the company’s digital transformation goals and maximize efficiency through autonomous operations.”
For the broader Canadian gold sector, Côté Gold’s deployment carries some weight as a reference point. Among new operations in the Timmins–Sudbury corridor — a region already home to highly mechanized underground mines run by major producers — a Nokia-backed private network at a large greenfield open-pit could serve as a blueprint for operators considering brownfield upgrades. The architecture is designed to be OEM-agnostic, meaning it can support automation and monitoring tools from multiple equipment suppliers rather than locking a site into a single vendor’s ecosystem. That flexibility is likely to matter as autonomous haulage and geotechnical monitoring scale across the industry.
Côté Gold is not the first Canadian mine to explore private LTE, but it is among a relatively small group to have fully committed to a 4G/5G foundation from the outset of operations. For engineers and operations managers evaluating similar infrastructure decisions, the deployment offers an early data point on what it looks like to build a new gold operation around low-latency, high-bandwidth wireless from day one — rather than retrofitting it later.
