In Automation World’s August 2013 supplement, Industrial Ethernet Review, writer Terry Costlow talks about the wireless revolution that is transforming industrial networking. Wi-Fi and 4G phone networks are helping wireless industrial communications improve and deliver on their promises of productivity, efficiency and secure ease of use. New technology is not pushing out the old so much as pushing on it. This means network administrators are finding themselves straddling multiple worlds, and having to become the bridge.
“Improvements are coming as business and commercial groups push the IEEE 802.11 standard forward, and those advances ripple down to industrial products. As Wi-Fi’s speeds have gone up with new versions of the standard, for example, other technical issues like jitter were also repaired,” says Costlow.
Now the need for 100 percent coverage is forcing some companies to move to the latest version of Wi-Fi, 802.11ac. Makers of commercial routers and laptops have been shipping ac products for a relatively short time, but there’s already interest from some industrial suppliers because it adapts well in cluttered industrial facilities where obstacles often block signals. In-plant wireless networks without dead zones or dropped communications would be a dream come true.
But don’t get your hopes up too soon. Benson Hougland, manufacturing vice president for automation vendor Opto 22, says the rollout of 802.11ac Wi-Fi by industrial suppliers is likely to take a while. “Many have not yet adopted 802.11n, which is the de facto standard in laptops and other consumer products today,” he says.
A bold experiment launched by Google in June may be the next frontier of new technology for wireless communications. Project Loon promises “balloon-powered internet for everyone” no matter where they are on the planet. Balloons floating in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather, become roving wireless connection points that people could access using a special Internet antenna attached to their building.
In a recent blog post, Mike Fahrion of B&B Electronics explained it this way: “Signals will be relayed from balloon to balloon until they can find a connection to Ethernet infrastructure and the wider Internet. Google is planning a roving, global, mesh network.”
Fahrion noted some problems with the idea: “My math says that it would take 250,000 of the things just to cover North America. And they can only stay airborne for two or three months, so balloon manufacture and maintenance would automatically have to become a major industry. Radio bands are allocated differently from one country to the next – so how is Google ever going to get the whole world to reserve the same slice of RF Spectrum for aerial Internet? And what about the overflights? I sure wouldn’t want to invest in anything that was going to have to violate North Korean airspace.”
Despite the obstacles, a global mesh network could solve a lot of today’s problems with wireless communications access. It could also add another dimension of both pressure and opportunity for industrial communications.
Figuring out how to combine old and new technology is certainly nothing new to industry. Remember serial communications? Fahrion did a webinar for Automation World on it recently in which he covered some important topics like grounding, which are essential to the many serial networks still in use today. “Like balloon technology, serial isn’t the newest thing to come down the road, but it’s still as useful as it ever was,” Fahrion said.
Just as Google is taking old technology (balloons) and combining it with new technology (the Internet), those tasked with keeping up with industrial communications are going to have to come up with their own hybrid solutions. Viva la revolution!
