While the life of the handset battery at our fingertips is a constant source of thought for many, the power behind the networks that bring our devices to life is often left without a second thought.
But that’s a mistake, especially for operators.
According to Chris Mangum, CEO of battery management solutions company Servato Corp, battery management will become increasingly critical to provide seamless, continual power to networks carrying increasing amounts of traffic.
“For a wireless carrier each of those (cell) sites have a specific amount of capital associated with them and when that site goes down, there’s a significant amount of capital lost,” Mangum said. “In an IoT world…it’s going to be very important that power to the Internet doesn’t go down. And the way power, especially backup power, is being managed (now) there’s a serious possibility that it will go down.”
But Mangum said the switch to battery management can bring more than just support – it can bring savings.
Thanks to the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT), Mangum said companies like Servato can now monitor and manage cell site batteries from afar. The result, he said, is an increased return on investment via a “dramatically” extended battery life and more efficient deployment of technical personnel.
“The way the batteries are managed now, the technician just loads up his truck with the batteries and goes out to the site and has no idea what he’s going to find,” Mangum said. “But if the maintenance person has more information before going to those sites, operators can manage those sites much more efficiently with less time on sites and fewer visits.”
The way the system works, Mangum said, is that the batteries are connected to the Internet and information is collected about them. This connection gives technicians an instant remote view of how the batteries are performing, where failures have occurred and other diagnostic information.
Over time, Mangum said, enough information accumulates to allow operators to spot patterns and predict battery failures, defective batteries and other issues well in advance.
Unlike other battery management companies, Mangum said Servato also provides active battery charging oversight, using analytics to determine the best charging patterns to extend the life of the equipment.
“Some other monitoring solutions will at least tell you there’s a problem, but the thing that really makes our solution different is the way we manage the charge and the battery life extension associated with that,” Mangum said. “We haven’t really seen anyone else out there doing that.”
Mangum said Servato’s system can either be cloud-based or integrated by carriers internally.
Filed Under: IoT • IIoT • Internet of things • Industry 4.0, Infrastructure