Nickel cadmium telecom batteries how are they doing after 5 years of operation?

After the first nickel cadmium (Ni-Cd) battery was engineered and installed as a trial battery in a live remote telecom terminal over 7 years ago, a large-scale deployment soon followed. Today more than 25,000 48-volt battery strings have been installed worldwide and valuable experience has been gained. This paper will share this experience and make some recommendations to operators that are looking for alternatives to VRLA. While the telecom Ni-Cd batteries were engineered as direct replacements for VRLA, there are some important differences that operators need to be aware of. The paper will briefly describe the conception of the Ni-Cd telecom battery and discuss the main design criteria and explain how these were met. In particular, it will deal with the growing need for reduced maintenance and show that it is now possible to match battery life and reliability to telecommunications equipment in general. Experienced equipment manufacturers know it is not possible to introduce a new product concept into a new market without some difficulties and problems. However, by utilizing certain strategies and preparations such difficulties and problems can be minimized. Included in such strategies is the collection and analysis of observations from the field including reports from users. This paper will examine such information including statistics from customer complaint logs and observations and data from some key installations. Based on this information, we will examine bow well the expectations have been met. The discussions will conclude with recommendations on what operators and applications would benefit most from the specific properties offered by the Ni-Cd telecom battery.