July 2017 – September 2017
An old mine in a very remote location had been taken out of care and maintenance to go back to production. They had very poor wifi in the camp and no cellular coverage. I, along with the help of some clever handymen fit over a hundred access points giving wifi over the entire camp and more importantly wifi calling and other connectivity for the miners to interact with their families. I also identified a number of issues on the production network which I remedied, including a long standing duplex mismatch on a WAN link. The rest of the project was to simplify the network by migrating to subnets and vlans that matched and removing the huge amount of superfluous vlans to simplify and make the network much easier to manage. This project was done without the need to buy new switches as we were able to pass the wired camp TV network through the wifi access points as well as serve wifi and the current switches were able to supply power to the access point. It was a great project, giving folks the conduit to interact with their families is one of the things I love most about networking.
