Westermo U100 User Manual

Page 5

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OnTime Industrial Ethernet

100 Series

V 1.0

- 5 -


Section 1.2

Industrial Ethernet – What Are The Differences?

Within the UK Market, and possibly the majority of Europe, Ethernet is moving into the
Automation Industry. Manufacturers are exporting their legacy protocols onto Ethernet,
designing new IP based communication protocols and providing embedded Web-Pages
within PLCs to provide real-time information using simple tools like Internet Explorer and
Netscape.

However, the domain of Ethernet has always been controlled by the IT department who
configured office networks normally with an iron fist and dictated to the company how the
network would be designed with complex recovery protocols like spanning tree and SNMP to
help with fault finding and system analysis. If a network failure occurred the IT department
would casually look at repairing the equipment - there was no real rush as it was an office
network. However, with Industrial Ethernet you need very fast repair time, and, with an IT
department not present on the factory floor the maintenance personnel need to be made
aware of the fault, find the error and repair it - quickly.

Industrial rated Switches are intended to be installed in harsh conditions and electrical
environments with the added benefit of fast recovery of a network failure. The On-Time
switches are an excellent example of how such Switches should be designed – very high
operating temperatures, fast repair of redundant ring, layer 2 and layer 3 priority switching etc.
Without doubt, On-Time switches are technically superior to many similar models available on
the market.

























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