Rival Single Pair Ethernet Groups Merge Into One Association

Two organisations that spent about six years promoting the same technology separately have merged. The Single Pair Ethernet System Alliance and the SPE Industrial Partner Network announced on 14 September at IMTS in Chicago that they are now the Single Pair Ethernet Association, bringing together members from more than 130 manufacturing and technology companies worldwide.

The leadership of both bodies approved the merger unanimously. Per earlier coverage of the process, it was notarially recorded through extraordinary member assemblies on 2 and 3 June, with the new association registered on 20 August. The combined body says it will focus on development, standardisation, implementation and adoption of SPE for industrial communication, automation and IIoT.

Single pair Ethernet carries Ethernet data — and, in applicable implementations, power — over one twisted pair rather than the two or four pairs of conventional industrial Ethernet, cutting cable size and weight. The technology itself has been ready for years. What kept it out of specifications was not physics but the connector question: the two groups had long disagreed over connector specifications, and buyers waited to see which camp would prevail before committing.

That hesitation had a real cost, particularly for 10BASE-T1L and Ethernet-APL in process plants, where the appeal is running Ethernet to a field instrument over existing two-wire infrastructure at distances a standard Ethernet run cannot reach. A specifier writing a tender had no comfortable way to answer the question of which connector to require.

One association with 130-plus members does not settle every technical detail, but it removes the main non-technical reason to defer an SPE decision. The next thing worth watching is whether the merged body publishes a single connector recommendation, and how quickly instrument vendors line up behind it.