Not trying to hijack your sourcing/design discussion but:
In your maintainability calculation, you also need to think about
battery replacement/maintenance/repair.
You are going to need to roll a truck to every location every few years
to replace batteries. Who pays for that?
If your service fails during a power outage due to a bad battery you
have to explain that. What is your SLA on battery runtime? What happens
if you roll a truck and the customer has a blown circuit breaker?
Alarm companies have two different battles: Cellular technology upgrades
and battery replacement cycles. Often they have to eat the cellular
upgrades (Like 2G and 3G sunsets, and at some point 4G will happen)
Since monitoring depends on the cellular radio. They can roll that into
a contract renewal like “Sign a two year renewal contract and we will
replace ‘Your’ cellular radio for free”, other wise, your system
will not be monitored after this date.
I have seem some alarm companies offer to sell you the batteries (or you
can probably source them online) and you swap it out yourself, or they
charge for a service call and bill you for the battery as part of that.
Just something to think about if you haven’t already done so!
Hope this helps
G
On 6 Apr 2025, at 13:55, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
I'm trying to find something that keeps my customer's network gear
online for a meaningful amount of time. The challenge is that an ONT,
firewall, switch, AP, and some IP phones doesn't add up to be very
much load. Most normal UPSes get terribly inefficient at lower load
ratings. Add up all of the network devices a customer may have and we
rarely break 50 watts of load. Normal, small UPSes are lucky to break
50% efficiency at those loads whereas they may be 95% efficient at say
100 or 200 watts. Get a bigger unit with a bigger battery and now
you're even less efficient. Get a big enough unit to have extendable
batteries and now you're spending thousands of dollars for such a
small request.
I've gone asking, but haven't really gotten anywhere. The best
technical solution was from some electronics parts nerds that was
basically to build my own small rectifier and battery system. Great. I
can achieve high efficiencies with small loads, letting me have say 4
or 8 hours of battery. However, I've got a science project, not
something I can deploy at a customer.
I'm hoping one of you has the magic bullet in what product a service
provider should use in this scenario.
Oh, and of course, being able to centrally manage them from my own
iron would be great too. :-)
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com
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