Testing Testing Testing

I know that the general feeling on the SP100 committee is that we ought to be satisfied with a two-headed standard, Emerson’s and Honeywell’s– mesh vs. star.
Nonsense.
I say it again. Blatherdash and Balderskyte.
There is no excuse for this, fellow members of the committee, and there is a solution. It is a simple solution to implement.
Testing.
This is NOT religion, for Pete’s sake (whoever the heck Pete is). This is engineering!
So let’s suck it up and be engineers.
ISA should step up and at least pay for half the cost of the testing, and the other half should be paid for by each of the two consortia.
Jose Gutierrez has outlined a testing modality that worked for IEEE 802.15.4. We should know a good thing when we steal it, and do just that.
Get ORNL and INL and Sandia to test each solution, and find either which of them is the best, or migrate both to a single common standard.
We owe it to the automation end users to make their lives easy.
And as somebody said to me tonight, “Well if it is mesh versus star, then let’s organize meshes in the shape of stars.”
I’m going to keep banging this drum until I see some results.