The accolades (and data) continue to pile up at Servato, while the Thanksgiving holiday fades into the winter holiday season. As the giving season approaches, we could not be more honored to let you know that Servato has won the 2018 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award in the Global Energy Storage category from Frost and Sullivan. This recognition means a lot to our organization and the people that work hard every day to create an amazing product and customer experience. Servato rallied all of those dedicated people together last week for a team meeting in our Boston office, and one takeaway is that data is moving front and center as a top priority for us as we aim to better serve our customers. We believe that optimally designing the SPS-248 last year and the SPS-R™ this year has positioned us to make significant strides on improving technician efficiency and impact. Servato is also featured in the December issue of ISE Magazine with an article titled, Being Powerfully Redundant Matters. Battery management can be de-prioritized in tough scenarios when the cards are stacked against carriers, but it does not have to be that way.

The "Camp Fire" wildfire earned its place among the top 20 of California's wildfires of all time, with its destruction of over 150,000 acres through Butte county and the surrounding area. More importantly, it is already the most deadly California wildfire of all-time with a death toll currently standing at 85. Destruction like this rears its head all across the country in new forms. We pay our respects to the firefighters who have fought bravely to extinguish this tragic wildfire. Network service providers have a responsibility to mitigate downtime as much as possible during times like this. How are you preparing? 

In past newsletters, we have discussed the FCC, NRTA, and USDA efforts to stimulate rural broadband growth through loan and grant investment. Rural broadband requires more than policy changes.  It also requires a holistic commitment from community stakeholders to bridge the gap between public and private entities and work towards digital equality.

Organizations such as the American Medical Association exert direct influence on many facets of life, including in communications policy. Gerald E. Harmon, former American Medical Association Board Trustee, recently stated, "Patients stand at the intersection of health and technology. Without broadband and wireless, patients in underserved areas will face even greater health challenges". Telehealth spans myriad applications but possibly the most important enables timely responses in emergencies through the modernization of communication infrastructure, such as 911. "Over-served areas" meanwhile deploy convenience-focused products every day such as instant physician chats or direct delivery prescriptions.

While the AMA operates at a national policy level to effect change, local entities use a more grass-roots approach. Consider Grove, Oklahoma for example. The local utility provider, Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, rolled out Bolt Fiber Optic Services to their 9,000 members over the past two years. High-paying jobs relocated to the town as a result, and the primary school system received a technological boost to their learning platforms with Google Chromebooks. This kind of technology advancement drives population retention. In fact, the town population has seen growth in the past decade while the majority of rural towns in the rest of America have lost population. (Over 1,400 towns with populations less than 50,000 have experienced declines in this time frame).

Community-driven initiatives can combat the brain drain. Cooperatives and telephone companies like NOEC provide broadband where others have not in the past. At the application layer, Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, AL works with Mercedes-Benz to create mechanical and automotive jobs for students directly out of course completion. Partnerships like these subtly drive toward the same retention and development goals. States like Mississippi and Vermont are more direct in their approach by offering income tax breaks and grants. What is your state and community doing to retain young workers by creating opportunities for them to learn and grow?

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 availability 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 consumed over 90 quadrillion btu's of energy in 2009. That was about the same time that 4G LTE networks were being commercialized. A decade later, 5G equipment produces more power-hungry equipment that could potentially increase operating expenses. Large carriers incur tens of billionsof dollars in operating expenses each year.  During a conference this past month in London, France's Orange and China's China Telecom have gone on record stating that power consumption will increase three-fold or greater over the next several years.  More locations and equipment to manage in a network drives significant increases in energy requirements, from site power to truck rolls, and also makes network reliability that much more important.