Ethernet Is Moving Out of the Office Into Harsh Industrial Environments

Ethernet is an ideal medium to transport large volumes of data, at speed, across great distances. Previously, multiple networks carrying specific protocols were installed side by side to carry out unique tasks. This inevitably led to project costs increasing as additional fiber optic or copper cables were installed to deal with the increasing volume of data. Using Ethernet a single fiber optic cable can carry multiple protocols. Furthermore, manufacturers are exporting their legacy protocols onto Ethernet, designing new IP based communication protocols and providing embedded Web-Pages within devices that offer real-time information using simple tools like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Unfortunately, although network hardware has dramatically increased in speed and technology over the past decade the poor perception of Ethernet has remained; namely as being difficult to fault-find and critically being a non-deterministic network. A key development that overcame some of these issues was the advent of the Ethernet Switch.