Communications conundrum

One of the biggest shake-ups ever in telecommunications is just around the corner, with the combined issue of new systems and infrastructure appearing and old ones being phased out. The changes affect just about everyone, but the utility and process industries experience a paradigm shift in the way they manage data - both in terms of protocols and transportation. For many years, control and automation systems have relied upon widely available communications options such as UHF radio, PSTN, private wire and, more recently, GSM and GPRS to get data to and from remote sites. Field devices at these remote sites, on the other hand, have communicated with central supervisory systems using a range of proprietary protocols that automatically inhibits vendor interoperability. The availability of traditional communications methods has meant that users have no need to seek out alternatives and, even if they did, proprietary communications and highly specialised equipment would not necessarily yield any significant benefit. The difficulty in cost-effectively integrating some specialised systems means that highly manual and error prone business processes remain in use. The wide range of IT and communications standards available provides all that is needed to choose the right foundations