About ConnectedEarth
About
Digitization, from the side that lives with it every day.
1,000Knowledge Base terms
6industries covered
30+years of the founder's industry experience
Everyone relies on connectivity every day, yet only a few understand how it actually works. Like electricity, gas and water, it has faded into the background: a utility that everyone simply expects to work.
When a utility fails in a household, it is rarely catastrophic.
The same cannot be said for industry.
Industries have a large appetite for every utility, and connectivity is no exception. With the recent wave of automation, a connectivity failure affects far more than convenience. Interruptions stop machines, reduce visibility, put workers in danger, and cost millions per day, sometimes per hour.
ConnectedEarth is an independent publication for the people who live with those consequences: operators, engineers and decision-makers in industries where connectivity is critical and failure is expensive. We write from the perspective of the buyer, the installer, the engineer and the planner, with one aim: to demystify the technology.
Problems we keep coming back to
Communication Breakdown
Digitization involves many departments, and they work in silos. IT, OT, ET, connectivity providers and the C-suite rarely understand where the others are coming from, so decisions get made in a bubble.
The Optionality Trap
Tactical technology purchases that quietly trade away your future flexibility, sacrificing strategic planning for urgency.
The Promise, Not the Pipe
Connectivity measured by whether it keeps its promise to the application and the people using it, not by technology or vendor.
The Pipe Isn’t Alone
Many factors shape user experience and operational outcomes. Compute, aggregation, distribution, sensors and cameras all have to work together for a remote operation to perform as designed; the network is only one link in that chain.
Proving ground
Mining & Energy
Our deepest expertise is in mining and energy, which serve as the proving ground for our theses. Real-world effects, positive and negative, usually appear in these two industries first, because they are reaching ever further afield for the resources we need and are constantly stretching what digitization can do.
Where to start
Analysis
Our judgment on what matters and why. Our opinions, in our own words, informed by real-world examples, some of them first-hand.
Read the analysis →Knowledge Base
1,000 connectivity, industry, technology and application terms, with definitions, concepts, infographics and other data. It explains not only what each term means, but what it relates to and where it fits in the bigger picture.
Explore the terms →Signal Feed
The firehose of mainstream and digital media, curated through the ConnectedEarth lens. Context is king, whatever the source.
Open the feed →Industries
How connectivity and digitization affect specific industries. We currently cover aviation, energy, government & defense, maritime, mining and telecommunications, and we will go deeper before we go wider.
Browse industries →Who is behind it
JM
John McCann
Founder & Editor
ConnectedEarth was founded by John McCann after 30 years inside telecommunications, satellite and industrial automation, most of them on the selling side.
SW
Stephanie Wilson
Stephanie Wilson works behind the scenes, making sure the site looks and works well. She is also a researcher, contributor and educator, all invaluable in making ConnectedEarth a destination.