The Sites Other Providers Say No To

Most providers sell connectivity off a list. You give them an address, they check it against a coverage map, and if the answer is no, the conversation ends there. That model works fine for an office in the suburbs. It is useless to a resources business, because the addresses that matter in this industry are precisely the ones that fail a coverage-map check.

Summit works the other way around. We are a licensed carrier, holding ACMA Carrier Licence #388 since we started in August 2000, and complex sites are the jobs we specialise in. That means a site is a design problem rather than a lookup: we survey it, work out what can actually be delivered to that location, and work with you to recommend the right solution from the options that genuinely apply.

In practice that comes down to four, and which one is right is a question about the site rather than a preference of ours:

• Point-to-point microwave, where there is a viable path back to infrastructure. High capacity, low latency, no trenching, and the usual answer when the geography cooperates.
• Satellite, where there is nothing to reach. It goes anywhere, which is the point, and the trade-offs in capacity and latency are worth understanding before you commit rather than after.
• Private LTE, where the requirement is coverage across a site rather than a link to it: a pit, a plant, a yard or a camp that needs its own reliable coverage for people, vehicles and equipment.
• A fibre build, where the volumes and the life of the operation justify the capital. Expensive and slow to deliver, and occasionally the only sensible answer for a long-life operation moving serious data.

Most real sites end up with a combination: a microwave or satellite link for backhaul, private LTE for coverage across the operation, and a private network tying it back to corporate. Remote operations, sites with no infrastructure for tens of kilometres, temporary exploration camps, sites that need to reach a corporate network on the other side of the country, and sites where an earlier provider has already tried and failed.

We cover the whole footprint of a resources business rather than just the easy end of it:

• Operating sites: the pit, the processing plant, the workshop, the weighbridge and the accommodation camp
• Exploration and project sites: temporary offices and camps that need connectivity for a defined period and then need to disappear
• Technical and support facilities: assay laboratories, engineering and geological consultancies, equipment and parts suppliers, drilling contractors' depots
• Corporate: head office, technical groups and the logistics operation, in Melbourne or wherever else they sit

The point is that these are all one account and one design. A resources business whose site connectivity comes from one provider, corporate internet from another and private links from a third spends its time refereeing between them. When one carrier is accountable for the whole chain, from a camp to a head office, there is nobody to hand the problem to.

If you have an address that other providers have declined, that is the conversation we want to have. Send it to us.

The locations are the obvious part. An operating site is where the orebody is, not where the infrastructure is, and the same goes for an exploration camp. There is no lead-in conduit, frequently no mains power to lean on, and no commercial case for anyone to build to a single site. Sites are also temporary in a way other industries never experience: a camp that exists for an eighteen-month assessment phase needs to be connected properly and then removed, and neither of those is a standard product.

The data is the other part, and it is categorically larger than what almost any other industry moves.

Geophysical survey data, drill core photography and assay results, LiDAR and photogrammetry from drone surveys, seismic datasets, mine plans and block models, geotechnical monitoring feeds, and increasingly point clouds and digital twins of entire operations. A single survey can be tens or hundreds of gigabytes. A geologist or engineer needs to pull that down to work on it, then push a revised model back, and the same dataset may need to reach a client, a joint venture partner, a regulator or a consultant on the other side of the world.

That traffic is the wrong shape for a standard connection. Business plans are built for households, which download a lot and upload a little. Resources work is symmetric at best and upload-heavy at worst: models, reports, revised plans and processed survey data all travel outbound. On a connection with a fraction of its download speed available for upload, a 60 gigabyte push becomes an overnight job that somebody has to babysit, and often fails at 80% for reasons nobody can diagnose.

Then there's the video. This industry runs on conversations between people who are nowhere near each other: a Melbourne office, a site two time zones away, a client in Perth, an equipment vendor in Germany. Shift handovers, technical reviews, safety meetings and board updates all happen over video, sometimes for hours, and often with the site end already on a constrained satellite link. When both ends are compromised, the meeting is unworkable. Your end, at least, should never be the problem.

Deadlines in this industry have unusual weight. A resource statement, a JORC report, a tender submission, a regulatory lodgement or a bid deadline is fixed and consequential, and each involves transferring large documents and datasets at the last minute, because that's how deadlines work. An outage in that window is not an inconvenience you absorb.

The workforce is scattered by design. FIFO staff, consultants who work from home between site trips, engineers travelling between sites and offices, and a corporate team that may be in three cities. They all need to reach the same systems and be reachable on the same number, and their mobile service needs to work in transit and in regional areas where coverage thins out.

And most organisations here have more than one office. A head office, a technical group somewhere else, a laboratory, a depot. Those sites share heavy data and sensitive commercial information, and running that over the public internet between separately-purchased connections is neither fast nor appropriate for information that moves markets.