Single Pair Ethernet in industry - great technology, thwarted by the connector war?

In telecommunications, it is essential to agree on a standard. Without a standard, products from different manufacturers cannot communicate with each other. A sophisticated process of standardization is designed to ensure that, under the guidance of the IEEE, ETSI or ITU, these standards are created based on technical merits that result in end users achieving maximum benefit from the technology.

However, as the players involved in standardization are often companies, this process is always driven by tangible economic interests. For example, large companies are constantly sending employees to remote locations around the world to represent their interests. Many contributions thus become technical arguments for existing technologies, which are intended to secure rapid market access and as many applicable patents as possible for the providing company.

This is nothing new and not surprising. The most important alternative is to utilize your own market power to establish a de facto standard. However, in a market that is supplied by many producers, this is generally hardly possible. In smaller, fragmented markets, however, this can work well, as can be seen in the home automation sector with Loxone or Home-IP, for example.

The industrial automation market is probably neither as fragmented as the home automation sector nor as homogeneous as the telecommunications sector. And so it is that the Single Pair Ethernet technology from the automotive sector has been discovered for industrial applications and already two industry associations have dedicated themselves to spreading this technology.

You would think that more participants would also lead to faster dissemination. But this is likely not currently the case, because while the SPE Industrial Partner Network is in favor of the T1 Industrial interface defined by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 25/WG 3 and TIA42 in 2018 in accordance with IEC 63171-6 as a standardized Media Depended Interface (MDI), the companies in the SPE System Alliance are leaning towards the IEC 63171-2 (IP20) and IEC 63171-5 variants for IP67 environments.

For companies like #Teleconnect, which develop products for customers worldwide, the question arises as to which connector variant should be used. This often leads to unpleasant decisions and unnecessary product variants whose respective advantages are difficult to communicate. It remains to be hoped that the market participants will come to an agreement in a timely manner, especially as both industry consortia are primarily German companies.

What do you think? Do you see the fact that there is no uniform connector standard as an obstacle to the spread of Single Pair Ethernet?