Switches

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Industrial Ethernet switches differ from office switches in three ways that all matter on a plant. They are built for the temperature inside a panel rather than a comms room, they take the same DC control voltage as everything else on the DIN rail instead of a plug-top adaptor, and the managed models support ring topologies that recover in milliseconds when a fibre is cut, which is what keeps a control network running when a cable is damaged during civils work. The decision that follows is managed or unmanaged. Unmanaged is fine for a handful of devices in one panel. Managed is what you need for ring redundancy, for VLAN separation between control and CCTV traffic, for port security, and for any visibility into what the network is doing. Add Power over Ethernet if cameras or wireless access points hang off it, and remember that the PoE budget is shared across all ports rather than guaranteed per port.