In the near future, the industrial applications will have communication needs, which will exceed the performance provided by existing fieldbuses. Other fields of activity, like multimedia on the PC, encountered the same situation, which led to new, high-performance networks and protocols. Nevertheless, these do not consider the same requirements as in the industrial field. Therefore, it is impossible to use those networks in their current state. As IEEE-1394 ?Firewire? presents very valuable characteristics for the communication in industrial applications, we will analyze in this paper the possibility of using it for industrial control. The conclusion of this analysis shows that Firewire has very appealing characteristics for industrial control. Moreover, a comparison against a very efficient fieldbus shows that performance improvements introduced by Firewire are around a factor 10 in the worst case.