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How to Choose an Industrial Ethernet Switch

Choosing a switch by managed/unmanaged, protocol support (PROFINET/EtherNet-IP), port count, redundancy and environment.

4 min readUpdated: 2026-07-07

In industrial environments, an industrial switch (wide temperature, vibration-resistant, DIN-rail) is used instead of an office switch. The key distinction is managed vs unmanaged.

Unmanaged
Simple, plug-and-play, small network
Managed
VLAN, redundancy, diagnostics, PROFINET
On PROFINET networks the switch must be PROFINET-certified and real-time (RT) capable; a standard switch can cause communication faults.

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