FOUNDATION fieldbus is described in part by the International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC) Draft Standard IEC 61158 and the CENLEC 50170 Standard. The lower-speed H1 communication, running at 31.25 kbit/s, provides an open and interoperable solution for most field instruments and applications including intrinsically safe networks. High Speed Ethernet (HSE) communication running at 100 Mbit/s, is intended to be the redundant, high speed connection between various H1 segments and host systems including PLCs, providing a fieldbus "backbone" network. While both H1 and HSE are suitable for many industrial applications, HSE offers a cost-effective, high speed, redundant network solution using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Ethernet components. HSE provides a fault tolerant synchronized high performance fieldbus backbone as well as fault tolerant devices that are connected to the fieldbus backbone.