Pollen pervades our lives this time of year. For every show I went to over the past several weeks, there were dozens of people battling allergy symptoms. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation for America releases an annual report on what towns or cities are more afflicted by the irritants and then ranks them through a Top 100 (You can find the entire report here). New Orleans cracked the top 10 by rocketing to #7overall with Baton Rouge coming closely behind at #9. Other notable areas are as follows:

• Memphis, TN at #4
• Louisville, KY at #6
• Charleston, SC at #30
• Augusta, GA at #38
• Omaha, NE at #66

Despite the sniffing and sneezing, a lot happened in March. Rural broadband earned a few more wins through Tennessee, Mississippi, Nebraska, and New Hampshire. These initiatives will ensure telemedicine connectivity and support underserved areas in need. Servato earned another patent on Adaptive Charging methodology. You can find more about that below along with an interview with our CEO, Chris Mangum titled Recharging. Engine Policy and Advocacy also interviews yours truly and you can find it here. Additionally,  we dig further into the personnel that make the Servato team tick in an interview at the bottom.

Nebraska and Tennessee both received millions of dollars of capital injection this month through the Universal Service Fund and Tennessee's Department of Economic Development and Community Development. Windstream in Nebraska secured $2.2 million to serve 13 local exchanges in and around Lincoln and Omaha. All of these locations are within 100 miles of these two cities focusing all of this development on the eastern half of the state. The magic number for Tennessee also happens to be 13; except, there are 13 providers in the state that will split the $14.8 million grant creating broadband access across 17 counties. Grant winners will invest $20 million themselves for a total of $34.8 million throughout the two-year funding process. WK&T Telecommunications will take back the most to their community of the lot with $2 million for Henry County where Paris, TN lies. Governor Bill Lee of TN follows the footprint of Governor Bill Haslam, who announced the Tennessee Broadband Accessibility Act last year. The TBAA put forth $45 million through grants and tax credits to providers along with deregulating electric cooperatives so they can now provide broadband service.

FirstNet's efforts towards providing telemedicine in rural areas will start to take effect as an agreement with University of Mississippi Medical Center came to fruition. This relationship will lay the groundwork for other partnerships due to this being the first undertaking by the nationwide wireless public-safety network. The state of Mississippi has the 3rd highest rural population in the United States behind only Maine and Vermont. States like Maine and Vermont, such as New Hampshire, progressively set new norms for what rural broadband deployment should look like. The Granite State reached an agreement with Consolidated Communications to provide a public-private funding mechanism (New Hampshire Senate Bill 170). Consolidated upgraded speeds to 500,000 homes across the state last year. Chesterfield, NH will deploy municipal bonds instead of raising property taxes, typically incurring no additional interest on the bond.

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 battery charging. The new claims broaden the scope of protection afforded by the Company’s battery management patent portfolio for its novel battery charging system.The Company now has 4 issued patents and one pending patent application in this technology area.

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:

and here you can find the award write-up:

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.