Speedcast International Ltd, a leading global communications and IT services provider, has launched a high-capacity very small aperture terminal (VSAT) service for Udinsk Gold LLC, a Far East Russia subsidiary of Canadian-based Kinross Gold Corporation – one of the world’s leading gold mining companies. The corporate networking solution connects a regional office in Magadan, Russia, with the company’s Udinsk open pit mine development site, itself part of the wider Chulbatkan project.
The end-to-end connectivity solution is fully managed by Speedcast’s local operations support and will scale up bandwidth quickly and efficiently as site development progresses. This high-capacity, resilient and secure communications service manages SD-Wan and transmits data, voice and video traffic, and is vital to the project’s safety and efficiency. “Given the site’s location, reliability of service was of primary importance,” said James Trevelyan, Senior Vice President of Enterprise and Emerging Markets at Speedcast. “In that environment, the technology on the ground and connectivity in the sky has to offer extreme dependability to prevent downtime and costly service calls. That was a key factor in the company’s decision to select Speedcast.”
Kinross acquired the Chulbatkan project from N-Mining in 2019. The project is expected to extend Kinross’s long history of production in Russia beyond 2030. Chulbatkan is a high-grade, open-pit, heap leach project that is expected to be a high-return operation with a low strip ratio, attractive costs, significant upside potential and low relative execution risk. Udinsk is the first development at Chulbatkan – a substantial open pit gold mine with a low all-in sustaining cost. Its initial minelife is six years with a total life of mine production of 1.8 Moz and recovered strip ratio of 1.5.
In November 2020, Kinross stated: “At the Udinsk development project – the first project the company expects to develop on the larger Chulbatkan license – study work is advancing well. The 2020 drill program has ramped back up after challenges related to COVID-19 earlier in the year, and as of the end of Q3 2020, approximately 50,000 m of drilling have been completed. All of the current estimated mineral resources at Chulbatkan are located at Udinsk, which has a footprint that represents less than 1% of the approximately 450 square kilometre Chulbatkan license area. On the Chulbatkan license, a geochemistry and geophysics exploration program completed outside of Udinsk has returned positive results, with new anomalies identified. The large, prospective Chulbatkan license area provides exploration potential that is incremental to the Udinsk project.”
