Many automation equipment manufacturers calculate hardware costs such as PLCs, HMIs and switches in great detail when making project quotations, but tend to underestimate the expenses related to the network segment.
After a production line is fully delivered, network-related costs are far more than just a few Ethernet cables. Cross-workshop cabling, weak current construction, on-site commissioning, engineer business trips, later cable re-routing, and downtime caused by network failures all count as actual costs of automation projects.
Therefore, when some projects propose to "reduce costs by 40% with a smart network architecture", the real calculation should not focus on how much cheaper the router is, but how much redundant construction and on-site maintenance work the entire project has eliminated.

1. Dispersed Equipment Is the Top Cause of Unnecessarily High Network Costs

Take a multi-workshop manufacturing plant as an example.
Packaging lines, mechanical processing equipment, robot workstations and AGV areas may be distributed in different locations, but all need to connect to the MES, SCADA or the equipment manufacturer's remote operation and maintenance platform.
The traditional workflow usually follows this path:
On-site Equipment → Industrial Switch → Plant Ethernet / Optical Fiber → Core Network → Server
This architecture itself has no flaws, but once equipment positions are frequently adjusted, or a newly built workshop has no pre-deployed network, every new equipment island added may require re-routing cables, installing extra switches, and applying for new network ports.
At this point, the network architecture can be adjusted to "fixed network + wireless supplement".
The USR-G816 is a 5G cellular router that supports 5G SA/NSA and is backward compatible with 4G. It provides 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 1 of which is a WAN port that can be switched to LAN mode, and also supports dual-band Wi-Fi and RS232/RS485. It can be deployed on the side of the production line or independent equipment unit, serving as the unified network egress for this group of devices.

2. Isolate One Equipment Island First

For example, a robotic processing unit is internally equipped with a PLC, HMI, industrial PC and vision inspection device.
When the number of devices is small, they can first connect to the LAN side of the G816, and then the router connects to upper-layer systems via the plant's wired network or 5G. When there are more devices, they are aggregated through an industrial switch before accessing the G816.
The architecture can be structured as follows:
PLC / HMI / Industrial PC / Vision Inspection Device
↓
Switch or G816 LAN
↓
G816
↓ Wired / 5G / Wi-Fi
MES / SCADA / IoT Platform / Remote Operation & Maintenance Center
In this way, what the equipment manufacturer delivers is no longer just several control devices, but a pre-configured "small network unit".
When the equipment is moved from Workshop A to Workshop B, as long as the new location has available 5G or other network conditions, it is not necessary to rebuild a complete wired link every time.

3. Where Do the "40% Cost Savings" Mainly Come From?

The first major saving comes from construction costs.
For temporary production lines, leased factories, distributed equipment or devices that are frequently repositioned, re-routing dozens or even hundreds of meters of Ethernet cables and optical fibers to access the MES may cost far more than the communication equipment itself. 5G can serve as the supplementary uplink network for such scenarios.

The second major saving comes from commissioning costs.
In the past, when equipment faults occurred, manufacturer engineers often needed to travel to the site and plug in their laptops for troubleshooting. After establishing an authorized remote channel via VPN, many issues with PLCs, HMIs and industrial PCs can be diagnosed remotely first. The G816 supports VPN protocols including PPTP, L2TP and OpenVPN, as well as firewall, NAT and access control functions.

The third major saving comes from eliminating costs caused by network outages.
The G816 supports automatic Failover/Failback among Ethernet, cellular network and Wi-Fi, and adopts a dual-SIM design to provide backup between different operator networks. When the primary network encounters anomalies, it can switch to other available links according to pre-configured rules.
The savings in this segment do not come from reduced network service fees, but from eliminating downtime and manual troubleshooting time accumulated while waiting for the network to recover.

Therefore, the "40% cost reduction" cannot be simply claimed to be achievable just by purchasing the G816. The project should include cabling, network equipment, construction, on-site commissioning, after-sales business trips and network failure losses into the pre-retrofit baseline, and then compare it with the actual expenses after the retrofit. The more dispersed the equipment layout, the more frequent the cable re-routing, and the higher the demand for remote after-sales support, the more obvious the cost savings generated by the smart network architecture will be.

Why Do You Still Need Redundancy Even With 5G Deployed?

In industrial sites, "wireless networking" should never be simply understood as replacing Ethernet cables with 5G and calling it done.
For critical equipment, the more reliable solution is usually to use wired as the primary link and 5G as the backup, or configure it the other way around according to on-site conditions.
The G816 supports automatic switchover among wired, cellular and Wi-Fi connections, and the dual-SIM design can further provide operator link backup for the cellular network.
However, one easily overlooked issue remains:
While links can be backed up, a single router itself can still become a single point of failure.
For production lines with extremely high downtime costs, equipment manufacturers can prepare a backup router that has been pre-imported with the exact same configuration. When a hardware fault occurs on the on-site device, direct replacement is far faster than temporary re-procurement, VPN configuration and network parameter setup. For projects with higher requirements, redundant architectures such as dual routing need to be further planned.

Do Not Only Test 5G Speed Before Delivery

What really needs to be tested is the recovery capability after a fault occurs.
During project acceptance, you can actively unplug the wired WAN cable to check if 5G takes over the connection normally; then switch the SIM card or create a weak network environment to observe whether services resume; after the entire cabinet is powered off and restarted, confirm that the VPN, MES connection and remote operation and maintenance channel can be re-established.
The G816 supports DC 9–36V power supply, with an official specified operating temperature range of -35℃ to 75℃, an IP30 metal casing, and provides ESD, Surge, EFT protection and a hardware watchdog. During actual installation, heat dissipation inside the cabinet, grounding, and 5G/Wi-Fi antenna position planning should still be properly handled.

For automation equipment manufacturers, what the smart network architecture truly reduces is not the procurement cost of core devices such as PLCs and robots, but the long-term costs generated after equipment access, including cabling, commissioning, fault waiting and after-sales support.
Building individual production units into independent, movable, remotely maintainable "equipment islands" with backup networks is far easier to replicate than re-modifying the entire plant network every time a new device is added.
As for whether the 40% cost reduction target can be finally achieved, the answer should come from the actual cost data after project delivery, not from the router's parameter sheet.