Servato is VERY excited to be exhibiting at the UTC Telecom & Technology 2017 May 8-12. In addition to participating as a vendor at the Walker & Associates booth, Servato has been selected as part of of a special group of vendors to demonstrate cutting edge "smart" technologies. Here's a full description of how we'll be a part of Smart Systems for Smarter Communities: 

The Spring 2017 Issue of Battery Power Online Goes Deep into Adaptive Charging for Standby Batteries

In this article, written by Servato Business Development Manager Alex Rawitz, the benefits of Adaptive Charging compared to industry standard float are explained. Among the many benefits, the article describes:

• Battery life extension through the elimination of over-charging
• Improved battery data for better analytics and trend analysis
• Healthier batteries for more reliable backup power

Want to see the full article?

• Download the article from Servato
• View the Article at Battery Power Online

Article: Inside the Race to Build the Battery of Tomorrow

The article appeared in Wired on February 22, 2017.

“A battery will do for the electricity supply chain what refrigeration did to our food supply chain”

At Servato, we're aware of how "unsexy" battery technology is, but we also know how essential it is to enabling our modern age of electrionics and connectivity. This article provides a great outline of the scientific hunt for better batteries and what better batteries would mean for the world. It's worth reading if batteries are your business or your hobby.

How Servato can Predict Battery Failure Months in Advance and Improve Reliability for Active Battery Management Customers:

If you knew that a battery was going to fail months in adavnce you could replace it before an outage exposed it. However, you would want to be sure that the battery was really on its way to failure instead of replacing a good battery, so how can you be sure?

• Servato uses over five million hours of battery data to inform its predictive analytics.
• Using patented technology to perform advanced tests automatically, Servato gathers battery data that other monitoring equipment cannot.

Check out a couple examples of Servato's predictive analytics:

Free eBook: Adaptive Charging Allows us to Double VRLA Battery Life

In August 2016 Servato Business Development Manager Alex Rawitz presented the principles of Adaptive Charging at the Battery Power conference in Denver, CO. 

The eBook, based on the presentation, describes: 

• The shortcomings of continuous float charging
• Principles of Adaptive Charging and how Servato's hardware and software administers this charging regimen in the field automatically
• Case studies that demonstrate the power of Adaptive Charging to extend battery life, improve battery State-of-Health insight and reduce costs of maintenance.

The views of the panelists below are their views and their views only and do necessarily reflect the views of their employers.

At ISE Expo in San Antonio, Servato convened a panel of telecom experts to discuss how they approach the complex problem of backup power in their networks. The panelists included:

• John Greene: CEO of New Lisbon Telephone Company, a small service provider in East Central Indiana. John has 40 years of experience in the telecom industry.
• Daniel Jameson: Manager of Critical Systems and Infrastructure for TDS Telecom. Anything that’s concrete, lead, copper, power or battery related flows through his shop.
• Jim Caron: Engineering Manager, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont at FairPoint Communications. Jim handles both CO and RT Engineering including all common systems. He has spent 28 years in the telecommunications industry all on the landline side.
• Curtis Ashton: Power Maintenance Engineer. Curtis handles power tech support and grounding tech support. Self-described “power puke” and “grounding opinionist.” Curtis has been involved with batteries since 1991 and today is on the BattCon committee and a member of the BattCon Hall of Fame.

After several relatively quiet years since Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast, 2016 has already seen a slew of powerful storms that have people worried. In recent months there was Hurricane Hermine that did not cause much lasting damage but did dump heavy rains on the Eastern Seaboard. Away from the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Newton brought unusual weather to the desert Southwest, and Super Typhoon Meranti, the strongest storm of 2016 which packed winds of up to 220 mph, hit Taiwan and China. Hurricane Matthew is bringing another round of heavy wind and rain to the Southeast.

Outside of these high profile storms, people across the United States watched as Baton Rouge and the surrounding Louisiana lowlands grappled with what was dubbed a “1,000 year storm,” with rains of a magnitude only seen every 40-50 generations. The flooding caused havoc in Louisiana and displaced tens of thousands.

Preparing for and managing the consequences of these natural disasters is important to mitigating the impact they can have. The most important element to disaster recovery are communications networks. These networks enable accurate response services and provide preventative and recovery crews the intelligence they need to make the right decisions under high-pressure circumstances.

Given the importance of communications infrastructure – particularly for emergencies like hurricanes – it is not surprising that operators take precautions to prevent downtime. After physical damage to the network equipment, the most critical element of communications infrastructure during disasters is power. Power outages are common during storms and preventing outages from impacting service is a key engineering and operational focus for telcos.

The most significant component for contingency planning and maintaining power to critical telecommunications networks during outages are Valve Regulated Lead Acid (VRLA) batteries. Even for sites that retain a generator, VRLA batteries serve as the power bridge from the start of an outage to when the generator is fully operational. Many more telecom sites are too small to justify a generator, and hundreds of thousands of sites across the country rely exclusively on batteries for backup power.

Maintaining these batteries is a major challenge for telcos. For decades the industry has relied on technicians to perform manual maintenance checks on batteries at sites. The sheer number of sites makes even an annual check of the batteries extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and so the reality is that most sites do not see regular battery checks or timely replacements. Instead, batteries are replaced on fixed cycles regardless if they are dead or have many years of life remaining. In some cases, they are not checked until a service outage calls attention to the battery failure.

Servato is helping telcos, and other companies that maintain batteries for backup power improve reliability and save money on battery maintenance. Servato solutions are designed not just to improve proactive measures for battery maintenance, but streamline site restoration decisions during emergency situations where outages have affected multiple sites.

An article in The San Bernadino Sun reports that police in the California town arrested two men they believe to have stolen more than $50,000 worth of cell tower batteries over the course of a year. Outages aren't the only threat to backup power and service interruptions.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

This article by Richard Martin for MIT Technology Review addresses one of the most frustrating fields of research in modern technology - batteries. Batteries are essential to all 21st Century technologies from smart phones, to electric cars, to infrastructure and so are naturally a focus for research dollars and energy. Yet for all their ubiquity in the world, innovation has moved at a depressingly slow pace. The promises of game-changing technology leaps have not materialized.