Connecting the Australian Outback: Remote Mining Camp Multi-WAN Infrastructure

Begin with failure domains

A mining camp has at least three distinct network needs: operational systems, staff business traffic and workforce Internet access. Mixing them into one unshaped uplink lets a large personal download compete with dispatch or maintenance access. Build separate VLANs and firewall policies, then define which applications must remain usable when one WAN fails.

A primary terrestrial circuit, LEO backup and a lower-rate independent emergency path may form a useful design, but only if their power, carrier gateways and physical routes are sufficiently independent. Two dishes on the same mast and UPS can fail together. A backup that nobody has activated or funded is not operational redundancy.

Size capacity from demand

Inventory cameras, voice calls, telemetry, updates and camp-user concurrency. Continuous video uploads can dominate the return link. For a worked example, four 2 Mbps camera streams require 8 Mbps before tunnel overhead and other traffic. Use local recording and event uploads if the backup cannot sustain that load. Reserve an explicitly measured envelope for critical services.

Apply shaping slightly below the available WAN rate to keep queues in the router you control. Variable satellite capacity makes a fixed ceiling imperfect; monitor delay under load and revise the policy using field observations.

Engineer the site

Survey obstructions, dust, heat, wind loading and cable distances. Provide protected power distribution, labelled isolation points and a safe maintenance location. Size energy autonomy for the router, switch, terminal, cooling and radio accessories together. Keep credentials, diagrams and a recovery checklist available offline to the on-site technician.

Prove degraded operation

Disconnect each WAN during a planned window and observe application recovery, not just router status. Test DNS, authentication, dispatch access and emergency contacts. Cap guest traffic on backup and alert on unexpected satellite consumption. Record the maximum interruption and the manual steps still required; these define the practical continuity promise better than a green dashboard icon.

From concept to acceptance

Worked design exercise

A camp's four 2 Mbps cameras, two 100 kbps voice streams and 500 kbps operational feed need at least 8.7 Mbps of payload capacity before overhead. If the backup provides a reliable 5 Mbps uplink, it cannot carry everything unchanged. Local camera recording with event uploads can release enough capacity for voice and telemetry.

Create a degraded-mode policy and have operations approve the trade-off. During acceptance, remove the primary link while all workloads run, check that guest access is curtailed and confirm that camera recordings remain locally recoverable. Log the actual time until dispatch users can resume their tasks.