Sanmina-SCI, a leading electronics contract manufacturer working on the fastest-growing segments of the global Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) market, Hannah Engineering, an engineering consultant company covering the civil and mining applications fields and Rajant Corporation, one of the leading providers of portable networking solutions, have announced today that they have managed to make the first ever wireless phone call from inside a coal mine to outside locations like the Rajant's headquarters in Malvern, PA, Sanmina's office in Huntsville, ALA and to other locations in West Virginia.

The three companies said this revolutionary phone system has been tested in December in a former mine near Pittsburgh, a mine now used for testing and research by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

The project was jointly developed due to statewide rulings from West Virginia and because of the new 2006 federal regulations, which are included in the June 2006 Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act and is said to improve the safety inside mines by giving the miners the means to communicate with the outside through a wireless communication solution that will offer voice communication and the ability to track down the location of each miner in emergency situations.

As Bob Schena, the Chairman of the Rajant Corporation, has declared: the "safety within mines relies on having the most current communication solutions. The combined solution from Rajant, Hannah Engineering, and Sanmina-SCI offers a breakthrough in how miners can communicate, and be tracked, within a mine. This solution will go a long way to make sure our mines will be safe for our workers."

The used technology is named as the Rajant BreadCrumb and it has been deployed instantly, delivering portable and mesh-networking capabilities to the VoIP phones used within the mine. The BreadCrumb devices have been hand deployed, therefore enabling the network to move as the miners moved.

This way, in case an emergency situation arises, due to the tracking capabilities of the networking components, the miners would be very easily located using Rajant's BCAdmin network monitoring software, greatly improving the reaction time of the rescuing teams.

The VoIP phone that will be used in this communication system is called MP1 and is being built by Sanmina and will be specially manufactured to be used within mining operations. Also, Sanmina's Redi-Comm system will be used to automatically convert the digital signals to analog.

The concluding statement regarding this joint-venture project intended to increase the security in mines across the world has been made by Dewayne Hannah, the president of Hannah Engineering, who said that they "have been working on an integrated solution for almost one year. Only through the collaborative effort of our work with Rajant and Sanmina-SCI could this breakthrough in a communication solution for mines be possible. By delivering a complete system, coal mines can more quickly meet the new regulations, improve safety, and have better response mechanisms in the case of an emergency. We are looking forward to commercial deployment of the solution and to making our mines safer."