Five corridors carry the bulk of South Africa's mining haulage:
- Lephalale → Richards Bay — coal export
- Ermelo → Maputo — coal via Mozambique
- Witbank → Beira — bulk to Mozambique east coast
- Rustenburg → Maputo — chrome and PGMs
- Klerksdorp → Durban — manganese and other bulk
Each crosses different terrain, different network operators, and — for the cross-border corridors — different regulatory regimes. Your tracking strategy needs to account for all three.
The Lebombo problem
The Lebombo border post is the main crossing into Mozambique. A truck leaving Witbank on Vodacom's SA network has roughly 30 seconds of usable signal once it crosses into Mozambican territory. Then it dies. International roaming on a standard SIM is expensive (often R5–R15 per MB) and erratic.
Operators with experience have learned to send drivers with multiple SIMs. The intention is right; the execution rarely is. Drivers forget. Swaps create gaps in the track log. And during those gaps, anything can happen to the cargo.
What Multi-IMSI actually solves
A Multi-IMSI SIM card carries multiple network operator profiles simultaneously. When the device crosses a network boundary, the SIM automatically activates the strongest available profile — without any driver action and without changing IMEI or device identity.
The Flo.LIVE SIM is the one we deploy because its operator coverage in SADC is the most complete we've tested: Mozambique (mCel, Movitel, Vodacom MZ), Zimbabwe (Econet, NetOne), Zambia (MTN, Airtel), DRC (Vodacom, Orange). One card, one cost, every border.
PTO Lockout vs cloud geofencing
This is the misunderstanding we run into most often. Operators ask 'don't you have geofencing in the platform?' and assume that's the same as PTO Lockout.
It isn't. Cloud-based geofencing works like this:
1. Truck enters geofence → cloud platform receives position → cloud logic decides → cloud sends command back to truck.
That chain has three weak points: GSM coverage, latency, and cloud availability. A jammer breaks step 1. A border breaks step 1. A cloud outage breaks step 3. Drivers learn the chain and exploit it.
PTO Lockout works differently:
1. The authorised tipping zone is uploaded to the device memory at install time.
2. The device itself decides whether the PTO output is enabled.
3. No cloud connection required for the decision.
It's slower to update (you need to push a new zone to the device, can't do it instantly from a phone). But it's resistant to every common attack vector. For mining cargo protection, that resilience matters more than zone-update speed.
Closing the loop with cameras
A common follow-up question: 'what stops the driver from cutting the device wire?'
Three things in our deployment:
1. The device draws from the cab battery, not the dashboard accessory port. Cutting the wire requires opening the cab and tracing wires — visible to any other driver, mechanic, or workshop tech.
2. The Teltonika FMC920 backup tracker is installed separately, on a different power source, in a location no driver knows about. If the primary is disabled, the backup keeps reporting.
3. The Hikvision G40PRO 5-channel camera system records the cab. If someone is interfering with the device, the footage shows it.
It's not unbreakable. Nothing is. The goal is to make the attack visible, coordinated (multiple drivers, mechanics, workshop staff would need to collude), and slow enough that operations notices.