RALEIGH, N.C. and CAMPBELL, CA -- Relay and Celona announced they are partnering to deliver more consistent communications for frontline workers to improve their safety and efficiency.

With Celona's Orion platform providing private 5G and Wi-Fi across large industrial campuses, workers using the Relay system of action for physical operations can remain reliably connected throughout their facilities, even in challenging wireless environments.

Industrial facilities are among the most difficult radio environments on earth. Locations can be remote, campuses can span millions of square feet, and dense metal in refineries, manufacturing facilities, and warehouses can hinder radio propagation, leaving public cellular coverage patchy. And Wi-Fi's lower transmit power can make it unreliable for mobile workers on forklifts traversing large manufacturing facilities and working in outdoor yards. The result is a proliferation of connectivity "dead zones", where communication via traditional two-way radios – the most common mode in these facilities – can be compromised, leaving workers vulnerable to safety risks and operations to an incomplete record. For enterprises rolling out connected worker programs, those gaps create a ceiling on what any frontline technology can deliver.

Celona addresses these challenges by delivering enterprise-grade private 5G alongside Wi-Fi as part of a converged wireless platform that operates entirely within the organization's network. Relay applies Celona's private 5G to log and organize spoken observations from frontline teams in challenging connectivity environments and turn them into action in the systems an enterprise already runs. Since a worker wearing protective equipment in a loud manufacturing facility cannot easily type instructions into common digital workplace transformation applications, Relay serves insights from their spoken observations and instructions through the interface they already use: a ruggedized, push-to-talk radio.

"Reliable connectivity is foundational to worker safety and productivity, particularly across large industrial environments where traditional wireless technologies can struggle," said Puneet Shetty, SVP of Product and Field Engineering at Celona. "Together with Relay, we're extending the benefits of converged wireless to frontline workers, helping maintain critical communications across even the most challenging areas of industrial facilities."

The companies will deliver continuous coverage across the entire industrial footprint, and the operation's record of the work happening in it. Relay devices have been thoroughly tested on Celona's network and are ready to work out of the box. Real-time translation across 35 languages, leveraging AI models tuned specifically for manufacturing, keeps multilingual crews coordinated, while panic alerts and location context help keep them safe. The observations, handoffs, and judgment calls that teams generate every shift become part of the record instead of evaporating at the end of it.

"The most important piece of equipment a frontline worker carries is the ability to reach someone. In a plant that's loud, hazardous, and spread across acres, that's the difference between a near-miss and an incident," said Ibraheem Khalifa, Principal Product Manager, Relay. "Our partnership with Celona helps ensure frontline teams remain not just productive but also safe, no matter where in the facility they're working."

Relay and Celona solutions are currently being used in combination at customer sites in the food manufacturing industry. To learn more about the partnership and how the companies are collaborating to support critical wireless communications while also enabling greater operational insights, watch the video here.