## 12 Conclusions  
This research has provided experimental results for the viability of the application of Wi-Fi6 in underground gold and platinum mine slopes. This is due to its strong abilities, namely resilience to excessive multipath propagation alongside multiple wireless hops the ability to take advantage of the waveguide effect of slopes and its efficient spectrum usage due to BSS Colouring, OFDMA, uplink and downlink MU-MIMO, and enhanced beamforming techniques. Compared to other technologies like IEEE 802.15.4 (OpenThread), it was proven to be more energy-efficient and provides better throughput in a slope. For routing Wi-Fi6, the use of HWMP over B.A.T.M.A.N. is recommended due to HWMP's reactive nature, which establishes routes only when needed; this is crucial for slopes, as signals undergo excessive amounts of contained reflections which increases the risk of destructive interference. As for the Wi-Fi6 transport protocol, it is recommended that TCP as opposed to UDP is used due to slopes' waveguiding effect and Wi-Fi6's ability to make efficient use of its spectrum, which limit packet losses, ensuring that the robust performance of TCP is maintained in a multi-hop setup. This recommendation is based on a wide 80 MHz channel bandwidth. If a lower channel bandwidth must be used, then UDP should be the preferred choice due to the increased contention, resulting in dropped acknowledgement packets. From the 5 GHz experimental results, it can be seen that the latency and jitter values were exceptional in the slope, even across multiple wireless hops. This informs us that real-time applications in a slope will work quite reliably. Furthermore, the exceptional jitter results were obtained at very high throughputs; thus, this indicates that the system will easily be able to handle real-time video processing. A low-spec Wi-Fi6 mesh system with two spatial streams utilizing an 80 MHz channel bandwidth should easily handle the processing of real-time LiDAR feedback, which is generally considered very bandwidth-intensive (e.g., 100 Mbps). This work opens frontiers to the practical applications of high-bandwidth wireless communications in underground hard rock mine stopes. The world is rapidly advancing towards automation and integrated networks, yet stopes has been largely overlooked in this progress. It is crucial to demonstrate that incorporating automation and technology in slopes is not only financially feasible but also sustainable, aligning it with the advancements seen in other industries. Wi-Fi7 has recently been released; however, there are currently very few development kits available, and none are currently supported by the open-source Wi-Fi operating system known as OpenWrt. This will be crucial for testing the open-source mesh standard, IEEE 802.11s, alongside mesh-routing protocols such as HWMP and B.A.T.M.A.N.-adv. When this technology is better established, it would be a good initiative to replicate these experiments with Wi-Fi7, as each iteration of Wi-Fi differs greatly. **Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, B.L.C., C.P.K. and T.M.W. ; methodology, B.L.C. and T.M.W. ; software, B.L.C. ; validation, B.L.C., T.M.W., C.P.K. and S.J.I. ; formal analysis, B.L.C. and T.M.W. ; investigation, B.L.C., T.M.W. and C.P.K. ; resources, C.P.K. and S.J.I. ; data curation, B.L.C. ; writing--original draft preparation, B.L.C. and T.M.W. ; writing--review and editing, B.L.C. and T.M.W. ; visualization, B.L.C. and T.M.W. ; supervision, T.M.W., C.P.K. and S.J.I. ; project administration, S.J.I. ; funding acquisition, T.M.W., C.P.K. and S.J.I. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. **Funding:** This work was partially funded by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) alongside the Mandela Mining Precinct and South African Mining Extraction Research, Development & Innovation (SAMERDI) strategy, under the Real-Time Information Management Systems (RTIMS) programme.