Imagine that you have a product that you are about to produce. But you can not do it alone, but need help from other firms. Following up such manufacturing processes may be a "just-in-time" problem. For example, consider a fictive product produced by 5 fictive firms(with a low employee rate 1-5), which need to work together, but are geographically disparate. For this reason we need telco service to connect the firms together physically.
In the below list "cell" is as mentioned in this link:
https://www.comcores.com/ethernet-ip-solutions-for-industrial-automation/
For example:
- cell 1) (firm 1)produces plastic parts for the product
- cell 2) (firm 2)produces mechanical parts for the product
- cell 3) (firm 3)produces the frame of the product
- cell 4) (firm 4)mounts all parts to a ready product
- cell 5) (firm 5)packs and sends out manufactured products, or keeps a stock
If you have contact to/from the other firms then "just-in-time", bottle-necks, is a problem that you suddenly have the solution to. But, and here's the important part:You don't want that unauthorized people (hacked TCP/IP) have access to your business production secrets and methods, instead having a custom layer two LAN with no internet access, and access only over ethernet may be a good thing. Further, this would be ethernet over telco client loops. (Frame Relay, DQDB, ATM, ISDN or similar, the bandwidth is not critical).
The reason for targeting small firms is the fact that in case of loss of a major customer in a large firm vs loss of a large customer in 5 small firms, then each one of the small firms can easily change direction and produce alternative products instead of the first one which you produced 1/5 of. Further, investments necessary to set things up is in a small firm way much lower than in a large firm/company. Another reason is also that small firms tend to grow. If things go well, your produced product sells, then hiring more manpower is easy. For example, increasing manpower from 5 in a small firm, to 6 in the same, has a large positive impact on unemployment rate. Hiring more manpower is also less risky in small firms than in a large company.
Five computers (firms/cells) with ethernet cards would/could be enough on the LAN. One acting as server, the rest as clients which are geographically spread.(?)
So this is my idea. An industrial small scale Telco LAN(TLAN). Does this make sense, or am I skiing beside the track?
Feel free to bounce back at me, I would like to brainstorm this further.
