Ethernet presently has a market share of over 80 % with a rising trend, thus placing it in the pole position in the LAN landscape worldwide. Ethernet offers important characteristics that can give you significant advantages for your application:

• Investment protection through continuous compatible further development
• Network components for use in harsh industrial environments
• Fast assembly and start-up thanks to the simplest connection method.
• High availability of the networks due to ring redundancy and redundant power supply
• Continuous monitoring of network components through a simple and effective signaling concept
• Almost unlimited communications performance, since scalable performance is available through switching technology if required
• Networking of different application areas such as office and production areas.
• Data reservation in the case of Industrial Wireless LAN (IWLAN)
• Rapid roaming for Industrial Wireless LAN (IWLAN) for high-speed forwarding of mobile stations between various access points
• In Industrial Ethernet, plant-wide time synchronization is possible. This means that events can be arranged accurately in the order of occurrence throughout the plant.

Industrial Ethernet serves as the basis for use of Component Based Automation which is based on the PROFINET standard of PROFINET International (PNO).