Kirkland Lake Gold Ltd. and Rogers Business announced the launch of a 5G Wireless Private Network (WPN) at Kirkland Lake Gold's Detour Lake Mine (Detour Lake), the second-largest gold producing mine in Canada. Detour Lake is the first of its kind in Canada to be fully connected over a 5G Wireless Private Network, providing enhanced coverage, end-to-end reliability, full redundancy, and a low latency network across its 80-square-kilometre operation. Also announced, in collaboration with Rogers, the Company is building eight new wireless cell towers to cover more than 180 km along Highway 652 between Cochrane, Ontario and Detour Lake.

Providing reliable and critical connectivity will provide the local communities with improved service reliability and close connectivity gaps. This public network is almost all off-grid, with seven of the eight towers primarily powered by wind and solar energy. The network is planned to be completed and fully-accessible by Summer of 2022. To enable a fully operational 5G Wireless Private Network at the mine, Rogers has deployed five cellular network towers with its full range of spectrum frequency bands to support a diverse set of use cases and applications throughout the mine site.

The network has been built with a full failover backup system across the site. This provides always-on, private access to Canada's most reliable 5G network across Kirkland Lake Gold's 80 square kilometres of mining operations at Detour Lake Mine. The 5G WPN at Detour Lake Mine provides workers with better connectivity, communication, and safety while enabling a truly scalable network that will power thousands of new solutions. These include tele-remote operations, industrial IoT sensors to provide real-time insight into operations, drones that can deliver supplies to the bottom of the mine, future autonomous haulage vehicles, and exploration work.

All of these applications will be monitored and managed through a digital dashboard to improve efficiencies and productivity at the site.