BWMS says the OTN deal, made official in July, expands its product portfolio, particularly in the fiber optic market. For OTN, the partnership enhances its customer base in North America after working for more than 15 years serving mining companies globally.

The focus of the partnership is OTN Systems’ OTN-X3M, an industrial networking solution developed in 2008 that joins multiple applications to support automation, safety and efficiency on one pair of fiber.

It can transmit all of an operation’s critical information – including voice, data, LAN, video, SCADA and process control – between remote locations in the mine and the operations control room.

“OTN-X3M includes video features such as analog and IP capabilities; embedded channel switching; integrated video-over-IP streaming; real-time high-resolution images; an integrated video recording and management solution; and open interfaces for third-party products,” the companies said.

“The OTN Management System, or OMS, capabilities include graphical user interface (GUI), client-server architecture with single, multiple or remote clients; hardware management for components including nodes, interfaces and optical connections; connection management, monitoring and error reporting; internal and SNMP alarm forwarding; on- and offline operation, and more.”

The OTN-X3M system will totally segregate traffic for each application running on its backbone, the two said. This lowers the risk of network issues and complexity as more demanding needs, such as high-definition video cameras, come into play and take more bandwidth.

Also, the system has fast network convergence (less than 50ms for networks of up to 110 nodes and 1000 kilometers of fiber) without impact on the service layers.

The OTN system can be placed at both surface and underground operations, and also has application for the tunneling industry.