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Wireless, part 4: Protocol or standard?
May 10, 2007

In my continuing attempt to understand what is happening in the emerging wireless industry, I had a long talk with Rob Conant and Laura Abram at Dust Networks. They are the VP of marketing and director of corporate marketing, respectively. I had prepared the discussion by asking if there was going to be interoperability between various OEM's that are using their radios and TSMP technology. In other words, will Emerson, Invensys, and GE Sensing instruments (and whoever else) talk to each other? The answer was that there is no intentional interoperability outside of the WirelessHART protocol.

However, and this is a big however, instruments that are made under that protocol will be fully interoperable. After a few moments to mull that over, I realized that it means that any instrumentation, regardless of manufacturer that uses the Dust-based WirelessHART protocol will be fully interoperable. All devices will network and talk to gateways equally.

The HART part of it is irrelevant. This isn't about communicating diagnostics and secondary variables. It's about creating a defacto standard for wireless mesh networking using a somewhat unconventional vehicle. It's not hard to understand why Dust and its major customers would want something like this, in fact it makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint. Many end users will think it's wonderful and find it very beneficial. After all, it takes ISA a much longer time to ratify a standard. Using HART can create something far more proprietary and far more quickly. I can also understand that other companies (e.g. Honeywell) that offered different technologies to HART might come away from the experience somewhat disillusioned, but this outcome could not have been totally unexpected. (Read yesterday's posting about Sensicast.) I hope to hear from some of the other camps on the topic.

Posted by Peter Welander on May 10, 2007 | Comments (0)