Nick Chubb from Thetius, a British research firm, on the implications of maritime connectivity becoming a utility. There’s a day growing up that’s lodged in my memory. I was an awkward teenager, uncomfortable in my own skin and battling to find my place in the world when a small plastic box arrived at our house. My dad spent an hour or so setting it up on a windowsill next to the PC. He plugged in various wires and pushed the big grey on/off switch. Green and orange lights started furiously blinking as it came to life and a whole new world began to open up. We had broadband. For me, those early days of broadband were revolutionary. I could now spend hours at a time on MSN Messenger without being interrupted by my mum making a phone call (BRB, mum needs the phone). I stopped using my four-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM because I had access to limitless up-to-date knowledge through Wikipedia. Having spent many hours patiently installing new games from a multipack of floppy disks, I could now instantly access games online using a “flash player” and our lightning-fast 512kbs connection meant I only had to wait five minutes for videos to “buffer” before watching them. After walking to the local corner shop to top-up my PayPal account, I was even able to purchase my first set of DJ decks using just my email address. This helped teenage me quickly learn my place in the world was not going to be “International Superstar DJ”. The greatest innovations eventually become utilities It’s funny to think about what connectivity enabled back in the early noughties because, despite my reliance on it, I don’t think about it at all today. I rely on the internet for work, social connections, entertainment, transport, and even food. I’m so confident in the internet that I no longer carry cash and I rarely use physical bank cards. It is a solved problem. I also don’t think about electricity, running water, or central heating day to day. My grandmother was born in rural Ireland in a house without electricity, running water, or central heating. I’m grateful to live in a time and in a part of the world where these are all solved problems. I pay a relatively small amount of money for access to infrastructure that would appear miraculous just two generations back. The most impactful inventions in human history always go on to become utilities. Such is the demand for these great leaps forward that massive infrastructure is built to enable them to be used by everyone. Just like water, electricity and gas, connectivity has become a utility. Connecting to the internet is easier than turning on a tap or flipping a light switch. For the end user, it’s a solved problem. Gradual change When I first went to sea (a career I discovered thanks to the internet) I was dragged back to the early days of dial-up. Accessing the internet was not possible and I had to wait as long as four months between chances to “poke” my crush on Facebook. It cost $50 for 20 minutes of phone time and we had a single email address for the entire crew. We had an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement between us all that we wouldn’t read each other’s messages. Emails would only be sent and received when the Captain had something important to send, usually once per day. For someone who had grown up around computers, stepping onboard a deep-sea ship during the early days of my career was like a nostalgia trip. The computers onboard ran Windows 2000. Updates to software, charts, or equipment manuals we