Walt Boyes, editor in chief of Control magazine and one of the signatories to the appeal against the ISA100.11a standard which led to its failure to clear the ANSI hurdle back in November 2009, has broken his self-imposed silence on the subject in a recent posting on Control’s “Sound Off!” blog.

In what he calls a ‘capsule update on the wireless standards war,’ he reiterates how presentation of the Shell-sponsored “Nice” use case at the ISA 100.11a meeting in Orlando in February revealed shortcomings in the original standard. As a result, according to Boyes, the ISA 100 committee has indeed now decided to abandon its attempt to achieve ANSI acceptance of the current version of the standard and is instead balloting on a so called “maintenance activity” that will deal with the technical issues raised by the Nice use case and, at the same time, effectively bypass the procedural issues raised by his and his colleagues’ appeal.

All But One
The problem, as was pointed out last month, is that this whole laborious ISA 100.11a process is being overtaken by events. What prompted Boyes’ posting was the announcement by Siemens (see below) that it is to become the latest vendor to introduce a family of WirelessHART devices. As Boyes points out, that means that all but one of the world’s major automation vendors, the exception being of course Honeywell, and every one of the major device vendors is supporting WirelessHART. With end users calling increasingly vociferously for a single standard, most recently at that same meeting in Orlando, WirelessHART looks increasingly like the de facto answer to their

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