LOL, i finally got it sorted out.!!!!!!!
They say necessity is the mother of invention. We had been using a stone age method of programming RTUs which was passed down from "generation" to "generation" and never questioned.
Simply by using a straight cable attached to the 10BaseT ethernet port and a laptop we can configure all the RTU's out in the field without having to carry them in.
Our network is not flat, we have subnets and routers scattered all over the place. The EBCs sit on all different subnets behind these routers, so remotely managing them has been proving a nightmare.
We are currently migrating them to a separate network so this should hopefully simplify matters.