Case Study: BAA (Heathrow Airport) achieves secure, scalable wireless coverage for 30M annual passengers with HPE Aruba Networking

BAA Terminal 5 - Britain’s Front Door Goes Wireless With Aruba Networks

BAA’s Terminal 5 at London Heathrow — serving some 30 million passengers a year within the world’s busiest international airport complex — needed a robust, scalable WLAN able to support public hotspots, retail Point-of-Sale, staff access and critical baggage and taxi operations across a highly RF-challenging environment of glass, steel and dense crowds. BAA required secure separation of public and internal traffic, multi-SSID support, ease of management, resilience and the ability to work closely with a flexible vendor.

After a competitive tender BAA deployed Aruba: six 6000 mobility controllers with M3 modules, roughly 800 AP70 access points and PEF/WIDS licensing, using Aruba Adaptive Radio Management and centralized control. The single WLAN now securely segments services (corporate, airline lounges, multiple hotspot providers, PoS and baggage systems), automatically optimizes RF performance, simplifies management and improved commissioning times for baggage systems — while providing a resilient foundation for future services like voice over WLAN and aircraft–terminal data links.

BAA

Kevin Fallon

Commercial Leader, T5 Systems