Not Quite Making the Grade

Remember report-card time? Your teacher would pen out the assessments of each student's performance. You thought you were doing pretty well. You completed the assignments and delivered the desired requisites. Up until this point, there was no reason to believe that you would receive anything but a passing grade. Finally, the teacher calls your name. You open the report card. What!? A below-average rating?

Recently, the battery industry experienced its own report-card wakeup call. As part of an independent research study commissioned by Johnson Controls, more than one-third of telecom carriers said they were unhappy with battery performance. Specifically, the study, which was conducted across both wireline and wireless carriers, reported that 34% of carriers' influencers and buyers said they were dissatisfied with battery performance across the industry as a factor of network reliability. If this study were a school test in which carrier satisfaction was the goal, the results would have been equivalent to flunking.

Although the study measured carriers' perceptions of batteries, the test results suggest a failing on both sides -- carrier as well as vendor -- a blight on the industry as a whole. However, it also reveals a major opportunity for everyone to benefit with better education and open lines of communication.

What's going on? According to battery vendors, the major problem of the past has been miscommunication and misrepresentation by industry representatives of what carriers can expect from the battery. Batteries are an old technology. They have been around since the turn of the century, and they have been a part of telecom since its beginning. In the telecom world, they traditionally never have gotten the attention they deserved (unless they didn't work).

"People generally view it as a boring, low-technology piece of equipment," said Dave Shaffer, Johnson Controls telecom market manager. "People don't typically think of the complex chemistry of the battery as a state-of-the-art technology, when in reality it is."

One of the key trends in both wireline and wireless is that battery-powered backup is being distributed into the network and into the loop -- at the cellular base stations, at the remote base stations for PCS and in the fiber hubs for the wireline networks. This wasn't the way of the past. Batteries used to "live" in a very benign environment. They were in the basement of a central office with a full-time maintenance technician there to take care of them. The air conditioning maintained a comfortable 77 degrees. Even though batteries moved away from the central-office environment to a more distributed environment, carriers' expectations of batteries didn't change. Because of the batteries' usually reliable performance in a controlled world, carriers suddenly expected them to maintain that level in new worlds. According to battery representatives, it wasn't necessarily communicated effectively to carriers that they were going to have to take special precautions to meet the new ! requirements they had for batteries.

In the first cellular sites, many carriers created laboratory-like environments in which the average temperature hovered at a cozy 77 degrees, no matter what was happening outside of the shelter.

However, as microcells emerged and new PCS sites started populating the landscape, more unregulated environments began appearing.

"In reality, most of the sites are not kept at the nominal temperature of 77 degrees F," Shaffer said. "Many of the new cabinets, especially PCS, are being placed in environmentally uncontrolled enclosures with very harsh conditions, such as the deadly cold of the Minnesota winters and the hot sun of Phoenix."

According to battery vendors, this battery mistreatment goes to the heart of the problem. Most batteries are rated for 10- or 20-year life expectancies. However, those ratings are based on batteries placed in environmentally controlled environments. If the batteries are placed in extreme temperatures or environments, carriers should not expect the life expectancy to measure up.

"Heat is the worst enemy of batteries," said Bob Wittemann, C&D Technologies senior product manager of telecom products. "When you cook it in a high heat application, you can't expect the rated life expectancy."

THE PEPSI GENERATION In the last two years, Pepsi, Campbell Soup and a variety of other companies have begun "freshness" dating on their products. The concept behind this is to make sure that consumers receive the freshest package of products from the vendors. Although battery vendors haven't started freshness dating, some suggest that carriers would benefit by realizing that batteries are indeed perishable goods.

"You need to get the freshest possible batteries out to the users because they are a perishable good with a fixed shelf life," said K. D. Berke, Johnson Controls director of marketing. "You have to make sure the batteries are in what we consider a mild climate in terms of the temperature, and the charging has to be in a very narrow specification to get those life claims of 10 or 20 years."

"I think the failure has been to truly and clearly represent to the customer base the adverse impact of temperature and charging voltages on the life of the battery," Shaffer said. In addition to this, he suggested that there have been some suppliers of poor-quality products as well as low levels of customer service.

In the rapid build-out mode of today's wireless carriers, batteries may be shipped closest to their freshness date. However, there are inevitable delays in construction and deployment. When that occurs, the batteries with a fixed shelf life sit, and when they age for too long the life degrades. When the batteries finally are installed in the field, they may not live up to the expectations of the user. Vendors suggest that carriers should be more cautious with international installations. Consider what happens if the batteries sit in the belly of a ship for six weeks waiting to come across the water, then sit in a warehouse waiting to clear customs and then sit in the OEM's warehouse for another six months. They are likely to arrive at the customer's site a year and a half later fully degraded in life. The battery vendors in both domestic and international situations need to have efficient distribution channels that can get batteries to drop locations without extended exposure ! to other environmental hazards.

"When a customer takes a battery like that and puts it into an application, the carrier is going to think everything is fine," Berke said. "The battery will be charged up to some degree, and it will perform. However, because of all that has happened before that point in time, the life is not going to be there."

In these instances, carriers and vendors alike suggest looking for manufacturers that have national distribution and international manufacturing capabilities globally to reduce this problem.

Carriers need to consider freshness, especially when batteries are in a backup state. These batteries may not have enough power to provide the service they are intended to provide. The batteries get installed, and everything appears fine to the contractor or installer, but when the time comes to deliver power because of ac failure, the battery will not have the capacity to meet expectations.

"What we try to do is encourage lines in the distribution channels to get the batteries when you need them, not when you think you need them," Shaffer said. "This, in and of itself, can lead to tremendous leaps in customer satisfaction."

So if batteries have a fixed shelf life, what is it? According to battery vendors, it differs by battery type. Its shelf life is a function of temperatures.

"Under normal conditions, you are looking at a 6-month time frame," Shaffer said. "Generally, it will be longer in cooler storage and shorter in hotter storage."

Given the shrinking of cell sites and difficulties carriers face with site placement, there inevitably will be locations in which rooftops or nominally regulated shelters will house batteries and their backups. In these instances, might it be more economical to replace batteries more frequently than to build a site that is environmentally friendly?

"It is strictly economics," Berke said. "The way to look at it is the net present value of the cash flows. How much money are you going to spend over time replacing the batteries vs. how much of today's dollars do you want to invest in controlling the environment."

Most carriers have opted simply to replace the batteries.

To be certain, batteries have performed their requisite functions. Because of the growing gap between what carriers need batteries to do and what vendors are providing, it could push the technology envelope. Battery developers may be charged with developing an application-specific battery that is impervious to environmental influences. That certainly could happen, according to vendors. However, they warn that changes in technology will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

"There are certainly technological improvements to make the batteries more resistant to these impacts," Wittemann said. "Technology centers are developing new alloys and new battery designs and chemistries to help the user extend the life in the field."

Shaffer agreed, but pointed out that technology shouldn't be the only point of change.

"We are fighting the battle on every front," he said. "We are working on technology to make the batteries more sensitive to these harsh environments. We are pouring money into factory development to make a consistent and reliable product. We are investing money in marketing communications and training and investing in literature and technical support."

All of the pieces are there for battery vendors to achieve a higher rating on future independent evaluations.

Today's application-specific batteries are suited for the perfect environment. It is up to the carrier and vendor to put their heads together to determine how to create an environment to get the most out of the battery. Short of the perfect environment, carriers should be prepared by vendors to realize that batteries can't possibly hope to realize their full potential.

"The battery manufacturer wants to sell you the right battery for the application and the highest quality battery you can buy," Shaffer said. "From the user's perspective, they have to temper their expectations based on the environmental conditions that the battery is subjected to. You can't expect 10 years out of a battery if it is 120 degrees at the site. You can't expect 20 years out of a battery if you aren't doing the proper charging and the proper temperature compensation. There is some teamwork that has to go into solving these issues."

* Do your homework. Check with battery representatives to evaluate their responses to these issues. Look for application-specific solutions. Each market is going to have different requirements. Computer backup times tend to be short with a high rate of discharge where the battery only is called upon for five or 10 minutes. Telecommunications backup ranges anywhere from three to eight hours, with eight hours being the norm. Those discharge rates have different impacts on battery design. Therefore, you need to buy batteries that have been developed for the specific application that you are trying to serve. There is no battery that is going to serve all markets. The technology differences between PCS and cellular batteries are not going to be easily perceptible.

* Consider the grid design. The thicker the grid, typically the better the battery is going to do in full-life environment, but the worse the battery is going to do in high-rate-of-discharge mode. In wireless, carriers typically do not need a high-rate-of-discharge mode.

* Remember that when a battery vendor quotes a design life, the time frame is based on ideal laboratory conditions. If a vendor suggests that a rooftop battery can achieve its life expectancy in an unregulated environment, talk to other vendors.

* At problem sites, consider conducting a temperature and voltage survey of the site. Measure the voltages and temperatures over time. This may reveal why a battery isn't performing up to expectations.

* One of the key issues with battery charging is temperature compensation. When it is hot in the room, you want the voltage to be lower. When it is cold at the site, you want the voltage to be higher. Many of the old chargers don't have temperature compensation. This might be one easy way to improve the battery life at your site.