Manufacturers increasingly depend on data exchange between production equipment and business systems. PLCs, robots, AGVs, industrial cameras, and MES platforms all require dependable network access.

Wired networks can limit flexibility because production line changes often require new cabling. Conventional 4G may not provide the latency or upload capacity needed for industrial vision, video, and production data. Standard 5G offers higher performance, but its cost and power requirements may be difficult to justify across a large number of industrial IoT endpoints.

Manufacturers therefore need a wireless connectivity option that balances performance, cost, power consumption, security, and remote manageability.