A SINGLE Wireless standard for the process industries? Not a chance!

Well here we go again.  I just read some editorials in the latest issue of CONTROL magazine.  Greed and ego are proving to trump logic and reason once again.  Users need a standard, a single open protocol standard for Wireless communications.  In existence today with products being marketed offering this capability are Wireless HART.... that's it.  The Honeywell wireless is a proprietary protocol that Honeywell is batting to shove down the throats of the ISA100 committee that have been gathered for three years now trying to develop a standard.  While the battle has been quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, been raging in the ISA100 committee, Wireless HART has been working hard and growing its installed base.  By the end of 2008 there will be even more products offering it, including the measurement instrumentation giant Endress & Hauser and Emerson Process.  I'm with them, Wireless HART is the way to go... and so is wireless in general.

For level measurement applications, especially those used for inventory monitoring and management, wireless offers the ability to save money by eliminating the cost of hard wiring and also enabling the connectivity of sensor and system across physical barriers to hard wiring.  But this wireless application is not anything new.  Many vendors have been providing wireless communications using proprietary protocols for years.  The new wireless standards hope to offer interoperability from application to application and vendor to vendor.  This is a good idea.

Joe

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