There is a great line in the classic 1980’s movie Top Gun, where Maverick says to his co-pilot, Goose, “I feel the need,” and they then say in unison “the need for speed.” While perhaps this is something that fighter pilots share with each other, it is rarely something we say when designing a control system, but that may be changing.
The main goals for most control system designs are reliability, effective and efficient control, and economical installation and service. As an industry, we have grown accustomed to the application, and the fact that since the processes we are controlling tend to be fairly slow to react, control systems do not need to be all that fast. While there are a number of notable exceptions to this practice (electrical and lighting systems, as examples), most HVAC control systems have settled into using communications that are adequately suited to the application (e.g., BACnet MSTP) but not exactly what we would consider to be fast or high performance.