In many people's minds, the concept of routers is still in WiFi, which supports the networking of smart devices such as mobile phones and tablets. They don’t even understand routers, let alone industrial routers.
What’s the difference? I know it’s for industrial use. But can you be more specific?
The most distinguishing and intuitive difference is the price. Industrial routers are more expensive than home routers. But seriously, besides price, what makes industrial routers special?
Home routers are placed indoors while industrial ones are mostly placed outdoors.
Industrial routers often meet conditions like dusty, wet, extreme cold or hot, high electromagnetic interference, and other harsh industrial environments.
The requirements for routers in industrial environments are actually requirements for their electronic components.
Ordinary CPUs home routers use wouldn’t survive those harsh environments. Therefore, industrial routers are equipped with industrial-designed chips, together with ruggedized enclosures and internal components built.
The operating temperature range of general home routers is 14℉ to 140℉ (-10~60°C), mainly to meet the needs of room temperature environments, while the operating temperature range of industrial routers is usually between -40℉ to 167℉ (-40~75°C), tailored for industrial control in complex and harsh environments.
Industrial routers are often in some remote and difficult-to-access areas, so they mostly use SIM cards to get cellular network connections, with traffic control and traffic recording functions.
Home routers are connected to the Internet through ethernet cables or even optical fibers.
For home routers, it is often not necessary to run nonstop 24 hours per day. Honestly, most of the time, home routers are "resting".
Industrial routers need to transmit data among machines uninterruptedly. They are in a 24/7 working state, which also places a higher demand on the industrial design of the router.
For example, the chipsets used in industrial routers are generally high-performance and can run stably for a long time, some can even last 15 years or more. However, home routers do not perform well in long-term operations and are prone to crashing or performance degradation.
Speaking of crashes, this leads to the biggest difference between industrial routers and home routers in terms of usage requirements, which is ⬇️
The requirements of industrial routers are not necessarily faster than home routers, but they must be more stable.
A bit of flipping when you’re watching NetFlix won't make that much difference, but when it’s controlling a nuclear reactor (as an example) that could be the difference between a control rod being inserted or removed. Compared to that, the money lost when a vending machine goes offline is not a big deal.
Anyway, the last thing you want when using an industrial router is, all of a sudden, the internet is gone. The stability standards of industrial routers are much higher than those of home routers. Frankly, the purpose of you buying an expensive industrial router is to throw it into your IoT system and then forget about it.
The data of industrial routers often involves confidentiality, so industrial routers need to have rich routing protocols, more security rule settings, and more advanced firewalls, such as SNMPv3, static routering, policy-based routing, unified management protocols, etc. These protocols can ensure the safe operation of the router, and prevent hackers from stealing information.
Industrial routers also support a variety of VPNs and APN private networks, which can establish special encrypted channels according to customer requirements to enhance data security. Home routers have lower security performance with limited functions in anti-virus and hacking.
VPN usage is more than security. Home routers can be easily reached and checked, while industrial routers are difficult to access.
Normally when you configure your home routers, you need to be access to the LAN your routers in. But industrial routers are often placed remotely, then this time connecting to the LAN through an ethernet cable or being in the WiFi range is impossible.
After all, it’s called the local area network (LAN), since you are not local, how could you get in? Even though some nightclubs say adults only, some kids still sneak in.
How can we sneak in the “local area network (LAN)”?
The answer is through a virtual private network (VPN).
Yes. VPNs can fool the security guy of LAN and let us in.
We don’t have to be there but still can control routers.
Home routers only have RJ45 ports, which can only provide the network for home-use devices with ethernet ports.
In the field of industrial control, many devices have no RJ45 ports and only serial ports. These devices need to use industrial routers which can provide RS232, RS485, and so on interfaces to facilitate the connections.
Most industrial routers are used for data transmission between industrial devices, and there are hundreds of connected devices.
General consumer routers can handle 10-15 IP users, while industrial routers can support 50-150 devices.
Whether it is in the industrial field or the civilian field, when purchasing a router, you should choose based on your own needs. If you choose an industrial router for the non-industrial sector, it may cause a waste of equipment resources. For the industrial field, if you choose a home router to save money, the home router may not be able to withstand the high-intensity transmission pressure and "strike". Or because of the security protocol issues, resulting in data leakage, which will be a very big loss to the company.