Caban Systems

Caban Systems was founded in 2017 and is a designer and manufacturer of energy storage systems for mobile and stationary applications, including powering automotive vehicles and uninterruptible critical infrastructures. Headquartered in Burlingame, California, the company operates out of Guatemala, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

The company uses lithium-ion battery packs with software designed to prevent downtime and reduce the total cost of ownership and maintenance of towers in the telecom industry, to help the telecom industry save on energy expenses by reducing emissions in both off-grid and weak-grid tower sites. Caban Systems focuses on telecom towers located in areas with unreliable and non-existent electrical grid infrastructures, where the use of the company's systems can be more efficient than diesel generators or lead-acid batteries and require less maintenance. As well, Caban Systems offers remote monitoring of their systems. Other features and services of Caban's energy solutions include:

• Site surveying

• Site designing

• Civil engineering

• Electrical engineering

• Structural engineering

• SLA (service level agreement)

Continuo is the company's management software platform. It consists of a dashboard designed to display critical data regarding delivery, source and use of power at each site, enabling the visualization of the total energy throughput. This platform operates in tandem with Enduro, Caban's energy storage system, in order to reduce the frequency of maintenance visits to telecom sites. Continuo can be fully integrated with solar or the grid, meaning that power can be tracked remotely and troubleshooting can begin immediately if an issue arises.

Image of a Caban PowerPack.

Caban Systems' Enduro System is an integrated platform for installation at any telecom site. These systems include Caban PowerPacks, lithium-ion battery packs to power an energy storage platform that eliminates fuel usage. Caban Systems calls their PowerPacks low maintenance with a ten-year life expectancy and suggests a reduction of operational costs on telecom sites by 75 percent.

Caban Systems offers a DC Metering platform that centralizes energy use for infrastructure, sharing multiple carriers on a single cell tower. This approach allows tower owners to meter and bill customers for the amount of energy they individually consumed. Caban Systems suggests the system is capable of metering several discrete loads.

Caban Systems also offers site operations hardware to integrate power delivery solutions. These system features include:

• Caban Cloud Manager
• Caban Telemetry
• Caban Thermal Control
• Solar Controller
• Rectifiers

In February 2021, Caban Systems partnered with COATL S.A. de C.V. to develop a digitalization ecosystem in El Salvador. The partnership is a supplier agreement and represents a product validation for Caban Systems. The partnership sees Caban Systems deploy Enduro Systems and the Continuo Platform to more than fifty sites covering COATL's network nodes, microwave repeater sites, and TV white space radio base stations in its first phase. Uwe Martinz, President, and CEO of COATL S.A. de C.V., on the partnership, said:

Caban Systems is a perfect fit for us; their technical evolution brings a unique added value and optimized TCO to our network and enables us to evolve towards solar solutions and business models based on their cloud-based analytics and AI solutions in a next phase of the project.

The access to the Digitalization Ecosystem will be enabled by an Open Network Architecture built by COATL S.A. de C.V. and Nokia. The partnership between Caban Systems and COATL S.A. de C.V. is part of the Digitalization Ecosystem defined by El Salvador's Secretary of Innovation within the Digitalization Agenda 2020-2030, aiming at the reduction of the Digital Divide and sustainable development in the country.

Caban’s power solution is suitable for any geographic market, but it provides the most benefits for customers in markets where electric grid and network infrastructure is mostly in development, including countries in Africa, Central America, South America, and parts of Asia, North America, and the Middle East. Lead-acid battery backup for pairing with diesel generators can be especially useful in areas with developing grid infrastructure as outage risks are high.

The company has active deployments with many of the most established players in the industry, such as Phoenix Tower International, Telefonica, and SBA. Caban’s first commercial pilot deployment was installed in November 2018, on a remote off-grid site subject to harsh weather conditions, and has been providing uninterrupted power to the site's critical infrastructure since then. The installment requires minimal routine maintenance carried out remotely by Caban engineers. Caban works with customers across Latin America, North America and the Middle East.

Alexandra Rasch, the founder and CEO of Caban Systems, claims that the company is distinguished in the industry by offering a fully integrated, software-enabled, end-to-end platform for multiple applications from a singular vendor. She has said that Caban Systems is the only technology company manufacturing and delivering its own batteries, systems, installation, and O&M (operations & maintenance). According to her, most other energy companies that provide EaaS (Energy-as-a-Service) outsource their batteries, site controllers, and software.

Caban's power solution is based on the premise that correlating energy usage to each operator makes more efficient use of energy and benefits both the tower company and the mobile network operators, and that offering energy as a paid service simplifies operations for the operators. Moreover, the application of Caban’s machine learning algorithms aims to enable tower companies to offer clean power solutions with increased energy efficiency.

RocketReach estimates Caban Systems' annual revenue to be $20.8 million; Zoominfo estimates it to be $7 million; and dnb estimates it to be $2.18 million in 2021.

The global energy as a service market is projected to reach USD$86.9 billion by 2024, from an estimated USD$52.0 billion in 2019, at a CAGR of 10.8%. This growth can be attributed to factors such as new revenue generation streams for utilities, increasing distributed energy resources, decreasing cost of renewable power generation and storage solutions, and availability of federal and state tax benefits for energy efficiency projects.

Telesites SAB de CV is a Mexico-based company engaged in the wireless telecommunications sector. The Company specializes in the operation and maintenance of transmission facilities that provide direct communications via airwaves. Telesites is one of Caban Systems' customers.

Centennial Towers is a developer, owner and operator of wireless communications towers in Latin America. The company's cell tower in Durango, Mexico was one of the first sites to deploy Caban Systems' power solution. This installation enabled Centennial Towers to connect an additional 4000 users.