18 Apr 2019

WBA and Mettis Aerospace to trial Wi-Fi 6 for industrial use

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and Mettis Aerospace have announced that they will perform what they describe as the world’s first Wi-Fi 6 Industrial Enterprise and IoT trial. It is the first of a series of trials that will take place around the world.

Mettis is a designer and manufacturer of precision-forged, machined and sub-assembled components, primarily for the aerospace and defence industry. It will work with WBA members to test several use cases on a Wi-Fi 6 network at its 27-acre West Midlands facility, which is challenging in terms of connectivity, given the large geographical area that needs to be covered and interference from industrial machinery.

Dave Green, head of IT at Mettis Aerospace explained that Mettis doesn’t currently have Wi-fi on the shop floor, but he has been working to deploy it. “When we started hearing about Wi-Fi 6 and [its] benefits and [considered] some of the bad experiences that we’ve had in the past [when] trying to deploy Wi-Fi in the factory with our challenges, that brought us together with the WBA [through our relationship with the Worcestershire Local Enterprise Partnership] and their involvement with Wi-Fi 6. It [makes] sense, if we [are] going to deploy Wi-Fi onto our shop floor [then] Wi-Fi 6 should be the technology that we should be looking at because we want to… future-proof [our] deployment of Wi-Fi as much as we can.”