industrial//industrial Ethernet

From about 2000, Ethernet became dominant in automation as well, but control networks need properties office Ethernet never prioritized: low latency, low jitter, determinism, synchronization, robustness, redundancy. Each vendor ecosystem solved that its own way, which produced a family of incompatible "industrial Ethernets" and the fragmentation that still exists.

From about 2000, Ethernet became dominant in automation as well, but control networks need properties office Ethernet never prioritized: low latency, low jitter, determinism, synchronization, robustness, redundancy. Each vendor ecosystem solved that its own way, which produced a family of incompatible "industrial Ethernets" and the fragmentation that still exists.

The members, roughly in order of ambition: Modbus TCP (plain TCP/IP, simple and interoperable, no real-time machinery), EtherNet/IP (Rockwell's world, the CIP object model), PROFINET (Siemens's world, an expressive control network with real-time classes), EtherCAT (Beckhoff's world, hyper-deterministic, built for motion), plus POWERLINK and CC-Link IE in their own ecosystems.

The hardware follows: an industrial switch is chosen for recovery time and synchronization, not for throughput (determinism).

What all of them share with the serial fieldbuses is that they carry a control vocabulary; what none of them carries is the semantics a data layer needs, which is why OPC UA and MQTT sit above them rather than replace them (data).