About
I'm Ben Rutter. I'm an industrial network engineer, and I work at Belden as an AI consultant. This is my personal site.
- Discipline
- Industrial network engineer
- Works at
- Belden, AI consultant
- Contact
Why this site exists
Deterministic wired networks worked for years. Adding wireless and roaming introduced the hard problems.
In IT, a one second drop is a nuisance. On an assembly line, one AGV disconnecting shuts down the entire line. An autonomous bot that drops inside a safety enclosure means a temporary shutdown and a manual retrieval.
Wi-Fi engineers design for coverage and capacity. OT needs bounded outages and predictable roaming. Nobody owns the translation between what the application needs and what the wireless design must deliver. This site is where I work that translation out in public.
Who writes this
I started as a data center engineer with IBM. Then I was a network and sales engineer with Kendall Electric and Belden. Today I implement AI and agentic systems at Belden. I didn't learn plant networks from the outside. I lived the requirements.
Off the clock, my wife and I run a small farm in Ohio. The Wi-Fi covers about a 200-yard circle around it, and it works.
How the content is made
- 1Sources firstA ledger of standards, regulators, vendor technical documents, and papers, kept with every page.
- 2DraftedResearched and written with AI assistance, in plain words, with every number linked to its source.
- 3ReviewedI read every page. Nothing publishes until I approve it.
- 4CorrectedTell me when something is wrong. I fix it and update the date on the page.
- Research comes first. Every page keeps a ledger of its sources: standards bodies, regulators, vendor technical documentation, and peer-reviewed papers. Vendor marketing claims are labeled as claims.
- Drafts are researched and written with AI assistance. I review every page, and nothing publishes until I approve it.
- Signal items are found and drafted by an automated news watcher I built. Each day's items reach me first, and they go live only when I approve them.
- Specific numbers carry a small numbered link to their source. Every value in the requirements database has one, and each entry lists its documents with the date I read them.
- Field notes are mine, from what I've seen in the field, with every name removed. If a page has no field note, I haven't seen that problem firsthand.
- No customer is ever named. Sites are described, never identified.
- The tools run in your browser. They show their working and never call an AI model.
If something here is wrong, tell me on LinkedIn. I fix it, and the page's change history records the correction.
The full rules are in the editorial standards.
Disclosure
I work at Belden. This is my personal site. The views are my own and don't represent Belden. Nothing here is a product recommendation, and the site carries no ads, affiliate links, or sponsored content.