Install environment · Production floor

Built for the floor, not the closet

A sealed, fanless GL-4xCEFH-RPF hangs on a bare column beside the furnace and the spray quench, with no cabinet, no fan and no outlet. From there it reaches the far end of the hall over RG-6 coax: three times the 100 m Ethernet allows.

• Fiber · AX-24 to the switch
• ReadyLink over coax
• Cat6 · PoE++
• Power back up the coax

1. 1

   The production floor

   A bay of an aluminium plant: an extrusion press with its spray quench, a holding furnace, a CNC cell, a QC bench, shipping, and a hall that keeps going for hundreds of metres. The rack switches live in a conditioned IDF at the end of the bay, and gigabit Ethernet on Cat6 stops 100 m from there: the red gate on the tray, just short of the hot line.

2. 2

   Built for the floor

   The GL-4xCEFH-RPF bolts straight to the column between the spray quench and the holding furnace, in the heat, the dust and the mist. A sealed aluminium housing rated IP67, no vents and no fan to clog, rated for −40 to 65 °C. Its F connectors sit under weatherproof boots, the cables leave in drip loops, and it is reverse powered over the coax, so there is no outlet near the furnace.

3. 3

   The IDF: where rack switches live

   A rack switch needs a conditioned room, so the plant's AX-24 and EX-24 sit in a 2-post rack in the IDF at the end of the bay. The EX-24 serves what is inside 100 m over Cat6 PoE++: the supervisor's office next door, with its AP, phone and camera. From here, Cat6 stops at 100 m, which leaves the hot line and most of the hall out of reach.

4. 4

   Fiber from the AX-24 to the switch

   Single-mode from the plant MDF lands on the AX-24. Its SFP+ port 3 sends 10G over single-mode fiber (yellow OS2, LC duplex) up out of the IDF, along the yellow raceway for about 110 m and down the column into the GL-4xCEFH-RPF's SFP+ uplink. Port 2 feeds the EX-24, port 4 the next switch across the hall. 10G LR optics reach 10 km on single-mode.

5. 5

   300 m down the hall on RG-6

   RL1's RG-6 climbs into the ladder tray and runs down the hall. Ethernet would stop at the red gate, 100 m out. ReadyLink keeps going: 300 m of RG-6 is about 27.6 dB at 200 MHz, and at that loss the link measures about 1.15 Gbps aggregate. ReadyLink uses 3–200 MHz, which is why it reaches hundreds of metres on coax.

6. 6

   An IPC-8C-RPF at the far cell

   At the end of the run, an IPC-8C-RPF sits on a shelf on the cell's column: eight 2.5GbE PoE++ ports, seven of them out at up to 90 W each. It runs on local power at the cell, and as an RPF model it can feed the GL-4xCEFH-RPF back up the coax. Here it powers two cameras on the columns, a Wi-Fi access point and the machine's HMI.

7. 7

   One coax port, up to 16 clients

   RL2 feeds a passive 16-way splitter on the same column. On coax, ReadyLink is point-to-multipoint: one port serves up to 16 clients through passive splitters. Two outputs run along the tray to IPC-4Cs at the QC bench and the shipping station; the other fourteen are capped, ready for the next stations.

8. 8

   Cameras, laptops and printers

   Each IPC-4C has four 2.5GbE ports: three PoE++ outputs at up to 90 W each and one PoE++ input. At QC it connects the inspection laptop's dock and a PoE camera over the bench; at shipping, the label printer and a camera over the packing table. The switch doesn't send power down the coax, so each IPC-4C runs on power at its station.

9. 9

   Managed in ReadyView

   The switch and every client on it are provisioned and monitored in ReadyView. The IPC-8C-RPF and both IPC-4Cs show up through their host switch, so the cell 300 m away is managed from the same place as the QC bench next to the column, with no closet at the far end.