CONET is specified to run on instrumentation grade twisted pair cable at 62,500 baud up to distances of 10Km on one network. It has also been utilised on hundreds of installations at shorter distances where the cable is not characterised. The reason for this is that, some plants make use of existing cable where some of these are unshielded, ungrounded and or in poor condition. Some very large distributed plant networked I/O systems have been fully integrated without the need to run any new cables at all by just utilising spare cores in existing multi-core cables or even old spares cores in telephone cables.
Plant communications technology has advanced dramatically in the last decade. The range of instrumentation capable of being networked grows daily. It is not easy to connect disparate instruments and networks into a unified infrastructure, to make information available for real-time management and control. In retrofit applications this becomes even more difficult because of the limits of existing equipment, cabling and budget. CONET however is a uniquely positioned communications infrastructure that can blend many communications standards such as RS232/485, Ethernet, Radio, GSM/GPRS into a network of networks – an inter-networking technology that integrates these standard networks into a unified plant-wide I/O and information system. When you run out of standards, the rugged CONET fieldbus network can fetch data up to 10km away on existing cables – making possible the integration of systems not thought feasible.