The Gap Nobody Owns

or Why the right connectivity decision is harder than it looks.

When an asset-intensive company — a mining operator, an energy producer, a maritime fleet — decides it needs connectivity at a site, the conversation almost always starts in the wrong place.  The IT department or the executive suite see a treasure trove of data being generated by the machines and sensors installed in the mine or platform.  These machines are the heart of Operations Technology (OT) and also produce the wealth that the company enjoys.  This is where the rub begins…the OT professionals in the remote extraction site are rarely at the table when connectivity decisions are being made about the site. Connectivity decisions are being made by Satellite/Network buyers within IT departments and these disciplines rarely have the full picture of what is happening on the remote site.

Basically: no one inside the company owns the gap between the IT and OT departments.

The rapid adoption of LEO satellite connectivity — A disruptive LEO constellation provider in particular — was the most instructive market experiment the connectivity industry has seen in a decade. Not because it proved LEO works, but because it revealed exactly where the real problem lives.  Suddenly parties responsible for OT in the remote site could take some action and relieve their connectivity constraints with a mouse-click and less than an hour of installation.  The promise of a couple hundred megabits anywhere on the planet was like a panacea.  Unfortunately not all bandwidth is created equally and in short order the remote sites realized that depending only on “Off the shelf” satellite connectivity wasn’t enough for all of their applications.  While some communications, including video conferencing and sensor aggregation worked just fine, some mission-critical traffic flows — like remote control of machinery and real-time data intensive processing — reported spotty and unstable service due to the “best-effort” nature of the connectivity services.  This is a significant requirements failure mismatch…”Best-Effort” delivered to an enterprise that demands “Deterministic Service”.

LEO didn’t close the gap. It made it impossible to ignore.

The people making the purchasing decisions are almost never the people who feel the consequences of those decisions most acutely.  IT is required to ensure all data in the company is secure, governed by policies that protect the company and its revenue and made available to those who need it.  Under this umbrella the connectivity decision sits with IT who are trying to find the best solution given their budgetary and personnel constraints.  This invariably means that the department tasked with providing connectivity lacks deep understanding of the applications and OT machinery on the remote site.  

The satellite industry’s go-to-market model has a structural problem that everyone in the industry understands and almost nobody is fixing.  IT departments generally rely on Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to procure, package, install and maintain connectivity solutions for the remote sites..and to be honest they are very good at it.  The MSP becomes the de facto translator between what IT can specify and what OT actually needs.  

The reason this gap has persisted is partly structural and partly economic. MSPs relied on bandwidth markup for a significant part of their revenue — marking up traditional satellite capacity to a degree that made the professional services work around it economically viable. LEO has removed that markup almost overnight, bringing pricing down to near-terrestrial levels. The economic bridge that allowed the MSP to own the gap is gone.

The gap is still there. The entity that was supposed to own it is now under existential pressure.

The gap between who buys connectivity and who depends on it has existed for as long as remote industrial operations have relied on communications infrastructure — but for the first time, the economic model that papered over it no longer works. The companies that break out of the connectivity frame — that position themselves as operational outcome enablers who happen to solve the connectivity problem along the way — will access budget pools and client relationships that the connectivity industry has never been able to reach.

John McCann is the founder of ConnectedEarth, an independent intelligence platform covering the convergence of connectivity infrastructure and industrial operations.