U-verse's exploding batteries

I paused in my lunchtime perusal of today's Wall Street Journal at the mention that AT&T is having to replace 17,000 backup batteries located in cabinets housing equipment for its U-verse services. There have been two incidents of batteries exploding and another two where fires were ignited. Although most of the focus of the rollout of IPTV services has been on software, set-tops, network capability and scalability, and programming, there are definitely a host of other challenges to successfully deploying IPTV.