Aradatum recently announced the completion of a small-scale demonstration model for its 150-foot-tall mobile, self-powered macro towers that it touts will enable “universal 5G access.”

Launched in February of 2021, Aradatum raised roughly $15 million in its first five months and has been recognized by Forbes and Topio Networks as a standout in the telecommunication tower industry. Company President Larry Leete told SDxCentral the company pivoted away from the wind turbine space to the tower business when the pandemic hit.

“What we started to see was that the densification model that was originally designed for telecommunications kind of moved away from the city and the major metropolitan areas into more of the rural, suburban, and exurban environments,” Leete said.

The self-powered towers use vanadium redox battery technology and are charged by a vertical wind turbine. They can provide infrastructure for cellular, fixed wireless, neutral host applications, private networks, and edge computing in previously inaccessible and unreached locations. Each tower can generate upwards of 400 kilowatts at peak performance.

In emergency cases – when the batteries get driven down to below 25% of maximum power – a compressed natural gas generator is available. Otherwise, the towers are “completely off grid and completely net-zero,” Leete said.

“We think that there's a real sweet spot for that, especially in the whole aspect of everything being driven down to a net-zero footprint,” he explained. “We know we don't have any competition in this marketplace, especially from the standpoint of the amount of power that we're able to generate.”

The telecommunications industry produces as much CO2 – around 2% of the global total – as the airline industry, according to Leete. He added the Aradatum towers will enable more clean-tech applications -- a better alternative to the current enterprise approach to reducing emissions, which is “just trading credits back and forth.”

Rural, suburban, and exurban areas absorbed a number of people that left large cities during the pandemic. However, those areas often lack the power and tower requirements needed to support broadband services those new residents need.

“There's no way that that grid can be upgraded. I think that's a fact,” Leete said. “The grid was built in 1890. So you're taking a technology that's in the 21st century and applying it to 19th century applications. It just doesn't work, and there's not enough money out there to get the grid upgraded.”

Leete estimates it costs roughly $400,000 per mile to connect to the grid. For areas that are as little as 10 miles away, he added, connecting to the grid doesn't make sense. Because of this, Aradatum simplified the installation of its towers is a process that doesn’t need a crane and only requires four people on site.

While he admitted renewable energy doesn’t have the potential to replace the grid entirely, Leete said it can fill in some of the gaps, leaving the existing grid to do what it's designed to – “light your house at night, refrigerate your food, keep you cool in the summer, those sorts of things.”

The U.S. government is aiming for all internal combustion engines to be replaced by electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030. Leete also boasted that Aradatum’s towers can fill in some of the expected energy gap tied to the U.S. government's support of electric vehicle (EV) adoption, noting that just 24 million EVs will completely overwhelm the electric grid.

In a colocation environment, each colocation application needs about 20 kilowatts of power. Full colocation on top of each tower will generate upwards of 80 kilowatts of energy, leaving roughly 320 kilowatts unused.

“We have that leftover energy. We're able to redirect that into electric vehicle charging, too,” Leete added.

The company’s focus for now is on the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund environment – smaller, fixed-wireless providers like Resound Networks, Redzone Wireless, and Launch Alaska.

“If you can make it happen in those definite climbs like Maine and Alaska, where it's cold and it's out in the middle of nowhere, and especially in parts of Texas, you could probably make this happen anywhere across the country and across the globe,” he added.

Leete said Aradatum hopes to work with larger providers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile US, but first needs to have a tower up, running, and tested.

Although, the vendor does have a full-sized prototype up and running in Ishpeming, Michigan, plans to launch its first fully-operating tower in January 2023, and to have several more installations by mid-2023. With 300,000 new macro and small cell towers needed in the U.S. environment alone, Leete said the ultimate goal is for Aradatum to provide 3% of that – or 3,000 to 4,500 towers – in the next five years.