Wireless technology is a part of daily life. Odds are, you’re reading this very blog post on a smartphone, laptop or tablet connected to Wi-Fi, right? Before that, you likely checked your email, favourite news sites or other sources of information without giving a second thought. It’s true, the days of landlines and DSL have largely disappeared from our daily lives. But I’d venture to guess that if you are reading this in an office setting – on a desktop computer or a docked laptop – you are still “plugged-in” to a wired internet connection. In an age where you can turn your home thermostat up while you’re sitting miles away in your office, why are businesses so hesitant to take advantage of these advances, especially in industrial settings? Often, it comes down to one thing: reliability.

It’s hard to imagine living our lives today without the Internet. From finding information and getting directions to online shopping and YouTube entertainment, the Internet has become essential to the daily lives of most people in the developed world. Now let’s try and think about how our lives will change because “things” are rapidly being connected to the Internet. It is estimated that the number of connected devices today is about equal to the world’s population, or seven billion. By 2020 that number is going to increase to about 28 billion. The impacts of the Internet of Things (IoT) are being felt not just in homes but in manufacturing facilities too. The combination of IoT along with another important smart factory trend, the increasing use of industrial wireless, is transforming the plant floor.

Wireless Ethernet technology can be an extremely powerful tool for both the IT and OT environments—it makes it possible to successfully incorporate areas into the network that would otherwise remain silent. Whether it’s linking remote locations such as depots or offshore rigs; pulling in data from vehicles or field people carrying handheld sensors; or flexibly integrating other applications where cabling is just not possible, wireless can give you instant, reliable connectivity nearly anywhere.