INDUSTRIAL
Industrial IoT
Modbus and MQTT: why a 1979 protocol still runs the factory floor, and how its data reaches a dashboard decades later.
Industrial environments prize a different set of properties than consumer smart home devices. Reliability and long deployment life matter more than raw speed, hardware often stays in service for twenty years or more, and a noisy factory floor is a harder radio environment than a living room. Modbus, developed by Modicon in 1979, is still the protocol most programmable logic controllers and sensors speak directly, precisely because replacing working hardware to gain a newer protocol rarely makes financial sense.
MQTT sits at a different layer, moving that sensor data upstream to dashboards, historians, and cloud analytics once it's been collected. The two aren't competitors so much as two links in the same chain: Modbus talks to the hardware, MQTT carries what it says to wherever it needs to go next.
