Pollen in March and now measles cases reached record highs in April. We're only one-third of the way through 2019 and 764 cases of measles have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That surpasses the previous high in 1994 and also comes in the wake of the 2000 declaration that the disease had been eradicated. The chaos of the month does not stop there: Boeing 737-MAX crashes, major power outages occur abroad and home in the United States, Mueller's Report releases, and Tiger wins the Masters! Let's hope for boundless May flowers the rest of this month.

Despite the less than positive global media attention, rural broadband in the United States did experience a few bigs wins on a national and local level. A-CAM funding from the Federal Communications Commission generated an additional $65.7 million to go towards underserved rural locations that do not meet the 25/3 speed standard issued by the FCC. North Carolina also made a positive step forward after Vance, Granville, and Franklin counties all announced plans to deploy a wireless broadband provider by September. Servato also realized a few big milestones. We increased our batteries managed by 19% and site footprint by 21% during the first quarter of this year. Due to that growth, we now bring in well over 1 million battery hours of new test data measurements per week.

You can learn more about where Servato sees its role in the greater rural broadband ecosystem here and click below for an assessment on federal dollars for infrastructure.

The A-CAM dollars have been relatively evenly correlated as you can see in this chart. If you have more eligible rate-of-return locations then you should be receiving more funding to support broadband development. The two data points near the middle top show two carriers that are receiving more annual support relative to their number of locations than the average provider. On the other hand, there are twodata points beneath this linear line that stick out to show they are possibly receiving less money than suggested by their number of locations. These figures can be found online here.

Figure 1: A-CAM Funding Support

Regardless of the outliers, all of this new A-CAM support is going to smaller rate-of-return carriers instead of the large cap providers who soaked up much of the CAF-II funding. The public policy objective is to create a more equitable public funding landscape.

On a less cheery note, over 17,000 homes remained without power this past month and into early May in the Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas region of the country. Massive storms swept through after the infamous bomb cyclones that ravaged that area along with west Texas, New Mexico, and into Oklahoma. 300linemen were called into service to help triage the carnage. Backup power, network uptime, and other physical infrastructure damages have to be dealt with immediately to restore emergency, business, and consumer service. Customers using Servato's ActiView® analytics platform knew the health of their backup power assets before anyone left the garage, ensuring efficiency for networking and safety for their technicians.

Have you ever heard the late legendary Glen Campbell sing about the Wichita Lineman? The song depicts the daily grind of a power utility lineman and accompanying loneliness atop his post in rural America.

The Wichita Lineman unveils a deeper truth about this romantic character working atop the endless telephone and power poles lining rural roads in America.  So we thought we would talk more about this song in the below blog.

Servato's SPS (Smart Power Systems) product line builds on innovative design and proprietary technology. Adaptive Charging forms the central nucleus of our approach to better battery management, driven by the intelligent algorithm that charges and rests batteries to maximize life expectancy and availability. We are pleased to announce that we are using the performance data gathered from managed batteries to provide our customers insights into how their networks perform from a power perspective.  Much as power utilities track the frequency and duration of power outages, our SPS solutions enable network service providers to track the same.  This allows them to quickly identify problem sites and prioritize them to address network reliability issues. Imagine having detailed outage data identifying which sites are more problematic than others.  How would that improve the field's ability to request capital to address these issues?  Now stop imagining and let's discuss in more detail.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Servato our fourth patent on the Company's Adaptive Charging methodology. It is a newly issued patent that is a continuation of one of the Company’s earlier patents in its battery management patent portfolio directed toward intelligent charging.

Frost and Sullivan also brought attention to Servato in early January after they declared us their 2018 Global Entrepreneurial Company of the Year in Energy Storage. The attention and coverage extended well beyond the initial press release. You can find a few of the reasons why we earned the award here: