The Key to Leveraging Industrial IoT Data? First Do No Harm

How big of a hurdle is the remoteness of mines when it comes to leveraging IoT data?

Shuman: It can be pretty significant. In certain cases we still see sneakernet: pull the drives off, FedEx them back to a data center in order to be able to pull the data. Others will have limited infield communication, but if you do bring the device back to the depot, you can use Wi-Fi to do some of your communication. You have tiering on your messaging that comes off your device based on the level of urgency: what goes over satellite, what goes over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. And then you have jack-in. Some nature of an RJ45 jack to be able to get the data. Or you can just pull the drives depending on what is the more expedient way to extract data. Sometimes FedEx is your FTP protocol.

What is interesting about the longwall devices is that they are electronic. They aren’t diesel-powered, obviously, because you don’t want to use that in a mine. In essence, you have a big power cord sitting on the back. The same thing that is driving power to the device supports connectivity. You have limitations of over-the-air. When you have a big pipe on the back, you can flow a lot more data.