Years ago the term "connectivity" surfaced as one of those buzzwords that telecommunications gurus just loved to toss about in industry boardrooms and at meetings with their clients.
It had, after all, an authoritarian ring and rolled well off the tongue. Telecom marketing executives made it sound important—no, make that vital—for businesses to attain connectivity in order to gain advantage over their competitors in a global environment that was becoming increasingly cutthroat.
As it turns out, connectivity has had more staying power than most buzzwords in the business world. The concepts behind the word have proven time and time again to be, in fact, important in making or breaking a business venture.
In any type of business, getting connected and staying connected—easily, reliably, and cheaply—are essential to getting ahead and staying ahead. And the oil and gas business is no exception.
Worldwide sprawl makes the oil and gas industry a virtual textbook example for working smarter and more efficiently through proper connectivity applications. The industry has found that mastery of connectivity helps it cut costs, improve worker productivity, and in other ways improve finances.
Connectivity also serves to level the playing field among industry players, allowing small independent exploration and production companies to play in many of the same games as larger independents and supermajors.
Data-challenged
The oil and gas industry deals daily with mind-boggling amounts of data. These data—whether they be space-consuming seismic or security-sensitive financial—need to be communicated effectively between multiple office locations.
"A lot of oil and gas companies now have moved to some fairly high-tech applications to manage their business and their data," Chuck Sweeney, vice-president, business broadband services, Time Warner Cable, told OGJ.
The computers and technology that provide 3D seismic imagery, for example, process a huge amount of data and handle extremely large files. Over the years, industry has edged ever closer to the use of seismic visualization centers in which engineers can virtually "inhabit" a holographic image of an oil field. But moving these large data sets successfully and reliably still challenges many within industry.
"Unfortunately, the older telecom technologies don't offer the wide bandwidth availability that these types of applications require," Sweeney noted.
Metro Ethernet
Ethernet and local fiber optic networks, developed some 30 years ago, are becoming the most widely used technologies for connecting computers on a corporate network. Currently, the technologies are being used to connect multiple corporate networks in a metropolitan area network.
Metro Ethernet, as the method is called, offers more-flexible services than traditional telecom services, such as clients' specifications of how much bandwidth they want, usually within a range of 10 megabits/sec and 1 gigabit/sec.
"One of the interesting things about Ethernet is that it offers almost a boundless bandwidth capability that will be able to move data around pretty quickly and allows data to be reassembled in other locations," Sweeney said.
Metro Ethernet makes this kind of technology available to the enterprise market as well as to smaller businesses, he explained. "This type of bandwidth is no longer just reserved for carriers and for the Fortune 50," he said, adding, "Metro Ethernet networks are now making this kind of bandwidth available to virtually any business out there."
A second characteristic of Metro Ethernet is that it's extremely scalable, Sweeney said. Once a company gets fiber optic access and connects via Ethernet to a provider that offers Metro Ethernet services, it can order bandwidth based on its requirements, he said.
Within the oil industry, Sweeney noted, "small to medium-sized businesses often collaborate with partner companies rather than try to do it all themselves. And what often puts them at a disadvantage over the Fortune 50 is that it is very difficult to collaborate when you're operating at different locations, on different systems, and you don't have ready access to the data that your partner has," he said. Metro Ethernet solves these problems.
"You can say that Metro Ethernet is the 'great equalizer,'" Sweeney said, "allowing small and medium-sized companies to collaborate with one another."