With the advent of the IoT Internet connectivity is indispensable even on industrial plants, this allows us to have our systems always under control, being able to intervene promptly even remotely to solve any problems, drastically reducing intervention times. The Industry 4.0 then made Internet connectivity even more interesting by allowing access to tax incentives.
Every home, company, office has its own Internet connectivity, many times there is a tendency to use the present connectivity also to connect industrial devices. However, this involves having to adapt the devices to the customer's network by configuring IP addresses, gateways, etc. according to the existing situation. But the appearance of new operators or the reshaping of tariffs pushes customers to change their connectivity and this creates the need to reconfigure the devices. In many cases it is the customer who for safety reasons does not want industrial devices to be connected to his network.
Thanks to the advent of new operators and increasingly aggressive tariffs, it is now possible to connect the plants to the Internet completely independently using a cellular router. Among our products it is possible to find a wide range of GPRS / 3G / 4G industrial routers with ethernet connection with and without WiFi network.
Advantech B + B
In 2011 we started distributing Conel routers, a manufacturer from the Czech republic, today the brand has been acquired by Advantech.
In 2020 we stopped distributing Advantech products. This KB remains published to facilitate users in choosing alternative routers to Advantech.
wLink
Wlink Technology Co., is a leading telecommunications provider, specializing in the design and manufacture of cellular and wireless connectivity devices for the Internet of thing and M2M. Thanks to strong R&D team which has over 10 years of experience in wireless M2M field, it is able to supply a range of innovative industrial connectivity equipment, OEM Service, packaged products for wireless data, military and government M2M project.
In Wlink range we offer models UMTS, 3G, 4G and models already prepared for 5G. All models are in a metal housing and have the double possibility of wall mounting or DIN rail mounting. Except for the cheaper models, all come as standard with WiFi support, dual SIM, an RS232 serial port and some digital I / O.
Feature comparison
The following table shows a comparison of the characteristics between the two families of routers.
Description | Advantech | wLink |
Compact metal container | Option | |
High speed 4G network, backward compatible with 2G | ||
Possibility of DIN rail mounting | ||
Built-in watch dog | ||
Digital inputs | 1 | 2 |
Digital outputs | 1 | 1 |
Support for dynamic DNS | ||
OpenVPN support, IPSec | ||
Scheduled reboot | ||
Management of AT commands for sending SMS | ✔ (1) | |
GPS module support | ||
WiFi (standard on Wlink models except for cheap ones) | Option | |
Serial port (RS232 / 485) | Option | (2) |
Additional modules (RS485, MBus, digital I / O, Counters, etc.) | Option | |
OpenWrt (Available on WL-R220L Wlink model) | ||
Integrated Gigabit 4 ports (Standard on Wlink WL-G510) |
(1) The management of AT commands is only possible on the model WL-R220L OpenWRT.
(2) The Wlink routers apart from the economic models have standard RS232 / 485 serial ports.