True. all my assumptions have been that he is using the system for regular internet/office use, not massive data transfers. I know it says manufacturing facility, but don't they normally store all needed code locally on the die press or whatever?
No, firstly depending on what sort of process, the information from various machines and sensors will be needed in several other processes, requiring some sort of communication system. Secondly nearly all manufacturing systems now have MES, asset management and other data analysis directly communicating to the process machines to extract all that lovely data that makes all those lovely graphs for management, things like resources in, resources out, down time, fault logs etc. For many years these needs were served by propriety communication protocols often based on RS-232 RS-485 RS422 etc, but since Ethernet and fibre are now so cheap an affordable, and as the amount of data utilised in processes has increased, they have moved to these in a lot of cases.
