Why Selecting Industrial IoT Connectivity Is Harder Than It Appears

Why Selecting Industrial IoT Connectivity Is Harder Than It Appears

When choosing a connectivity protocol for an industrial IoT implementation, taking a thoughtful, measured approach pays dividends—even if it requires extra time.

The connectivity landscape is broad, the options plentiful, and the margin for error wide. In 2018 the Industrial Internet Consortium published a 129‑page paper, The Industrial Internet of Things Volume G5: Connectivity Framework, to help stakeholders navigate these complexities.

Rajive Joshi, principal solutions architect at Real‑Time Innovations and co‑author of the paper, stresses how overwhelming the choices can feel. “People don’t know where to start,” Joshi says. “A lot of these things are fairly obvious to me, but when you talk to others who don’t do this daily, it’s extremely confusing. If you’re comparing apples and oranges, you can’t have a meaningful conversation, so it’s vital to understand the landscape.”

With industry enthusiasm still high—roughly one‑third of large companies surveyed by IoT World Today in 2018 were in production, testing, or research stages—the pressure to pick the right, scalable, industry‑appropriate connectivity is intense. We asked experts for their top guidance.

How to Begin

Priya Thanigai, marketing manager for industrial markets at Texas Instruments, recommends starting with eight straightforward questions:

1. Is this a brand‑new network installation or a retrofit?
2. How many nodes will the network contain?
3. What data throughput (speed, bandwidth, and volume) is required?
4. Do you need multiple network types—for example, a low‑power, long‑range motion detector that triggers a camera streaming video over Wi‑Fi?
5. What are the strictest latency requirements?
6. How will the network be powered?
7. What are the top security concerns?
8. Could network congestion become an issue?

The answers help define the next steps, which may include consulting an IoT vendor. Patrick Fetterman, research analyst and VP of customer operations at LNS Global, cautions that not all vendors are equally helpful. “Some vendors assume connectivity is already in place; others focus heavily on it; still others view connecting equipment to data as a revolutionary idea,” he explains.

Tom Comstock, principal analyst at LNS, has seen factories across the globe, noting that “I’ve been in dozens of factories over the last decade and yet have never encountered one that wasn’t a mishmash of equipment types.” He adds, “Even within a single‑vendor factory, you’ll find multiple generations and versions deployed over a 25‑year‑old connectivity layer.”

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