Industrial Strength Networking for the Industrial IOT, Carrier Grade

As Industrial IoT (IIOT) systems become larger, more distributed, and enhanced through multiple applications which can run on separate or unified networks, discussions about how networking will work in a hyper-connected future are heating up. Whether offering fiber, cable, WiFi, cellular and most recently Narrow Band (NB-IoT) and LoRaWAN (Low Radio Access Wide Area Networks) services for IIOT systems, in the last twelve months more and more Tier One providers including AT&T, Verizon, Century Link and T-Mobile in the US, and Vodafone, Telefonica, and others elsewhere are investing, driven often by their existing enterprise customers. The traditional Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are not alone, however, as their challengers over the last few decades are also making networking partnership moves including cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM, and even data center providers who are following the trend towards moving compute (and real time communications) to the edge of the network, where data can be processed more efficiently more locally, driving predictions of edge computing becoming a multi-billion dollar industry, such as the Multi-Access Edge Computing initiative by ETSI or Edge Computing for IIoT activities by IIC.”