As a facilities engineer (usually known as an operations engineer to the rest of the oil and gas trade), I have to deal with instrumentation. I deal with old (aka proven) technology, so most of the gadgets I dealt with send signals via the good old 4-20 mA standard, which is reliable and very well understood.
This standard is old school. Current and upcoming field control technologies heading towards LAN-type data systems. One system you hear of often is the Fieldbus protocol. From the write-ups I’ve seen, it defines protocols for levels 1, 2 and 7 of the OSI model, which corresponds to the physical, data and application layers (read this excellent free book on TCP/IP). Ethernet defines levels 1 and 2.
So theoretically, you can swap up your cheap, off-the-shelf home Ethernet gear with industry standard Fieldbus equipment, as long as you can get software that is able to translate between the data and transport layer (layer 3). What’s stopping you?
If you were a real geek, you’d build a Fieldbus router to access the Internet, and maybe make it IPv6-ready as well.
Trivia: did you know that you can send power over Fieldbus lines?
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 
Jabba can’t understand.
In short, can I use the control room field bus and all the panel i nicked from xxxx platform to surf the internet?
Poor souls, operating a platform without the panels… wonder what happened to them.
Star Wars Trivia : did you know we can send midiclorians over fieldbus lines too?
wow, that’s a new one.
can they deliver pizza using field bus? i know that they can do it with mini bus