Unlikely, more like 'NAT' for regular users and pay extra $$$ for a real IP.

I work in the offshore survey industry (oil/gas industry), and 95% of products to date still come with serial ports. They are critical for our purposes, and onboard com ports are a must for timing critical jobs such as multibeam bathymetric surveys.

Current project im working on we are using Moxa multiport serial boards w/ 32 serial ports on this pc with around 25 currently inuse for IO. (Historically used Digi boards but they were awful for timing (relatively!), 30ms delay compared to the near 0ms on the Moxa units.)

Simple to use, easily available, and cheap. Almost all the devices I work with use standard parity/stop bits etc, just varying baud rates, which is easy enough to remember.