It is easier than ever to integrate and manage all the systems in an industrial plant over a single network and—particularly in discrete and hybrid manufacturing industries—that network appears increasingly to be Ethernet-based. But the people who think this is the last network they will ever install might want to brush up on their history.
As Terry Costlow reports in “Ethernet Takes Control,” many manufacturers started years ago to use Ethernet to build their control networks, and many more are considering it now. Food maker Nestlé started in 2009 and took two years to build its Biessenhofen, Germany plant, which produces hypoallergenic baby foods. With an eye toward growth and longevity, Nestlé decided on a fully integrated automation system based on EtherNet/IP. “We’re expecting EtherNet/IP to be future-proof,” says Florian Schreyer, automation engineer at Nestlé. Elsewhere in the article, Costlow reports “customers are future-proofing their [network] designs by going with Gigabit Ethernet.”
Whether the definition of future-proof is “guaranteed not to be superseded by future versions” or the softer “unlikely to become obsolete,” can anything be future-proof in this time of tremendous technological change?
I think not. And I use as my evidence The Museum of Endangered Sounds (http://savethesounds.info), a website that’s collected communications-related sounds both intentional and incidental: the Windows 95 startup chime, that Nokia ringtone, the mechanical noise a VHS tape made when it entered the VCR. Of all the sounds site creator Brendan Chillcut has collected, however, none is more iconic in business communications than the sound of a dial-up modem.
Most people reading this know that series of chirps and squeals, and listening to them ought to remind you better than anything that time marches on. As writer Alexis C. Madrigal says of all these sounds in his article in The Atlantic, “If you grew up at a certain time, these sounds are like technoaural nostalgia whippets. One minute, you're browsing the Internet in 2012, the next you're on a bus headed up I-5 to an 8th grade football game against Castle Rock in 1995.”
So, I propose permanently retiring the buzzword when it comes to communications technology, perhaps only using it when referencing the 2006 song Future Proof by the band Massive Attack. The architecture can be expandable, the cables can be easily upgradeable, the protocols can be standards-based, but no network really can be expected to last forever.
