Who Puts the Industrial in Ethernet?
Mark T. Hoske, Control Engineering Switches, routers, hubs, gateways, connectors, and other Ethernet hardware have been industrially hardened to take what manufacturing can dish out. Industrial Ethernet hardware can take plant-floor punishment without pampering in enclosures, allowing shorter cable runs with simpler distributed (rather than centralized) designs, and higher reliability than commercial-level Ethernet switches, routers, hubs, gateways, and connectors. Industrial ratings (such as NEMA 4x or IP67 and beyond) applied to Ethernet hardware mean that equipment can handle temperature extremes (as much as -40 to 85 [degrees]C), and even liquid and dust, and maintain reliable performance for years instead of months. If commercial Ethernet devices are reliably enclosed and cooled, that might be enough to preserve reliability. Beyond that, higher costs for industrial design will cut down on mean time between failures, possibly preventing a process interruption or data loss. It all d
