In Zhengzhou, the capital of east-central China's Henan province, electric bikes pose a challenge to the local government.
According to statistics, 70% of reported theft, 30% of traffic accidents, and 9% of fires were caused by electric bikes in the local in 2017.
The Zhengzhou Public Security Bureau, in partnership with China Mobile, Huawei and Tendency have piloted a Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) electric bike management system.
The project won the GSMA Award for ‘Best Mobile Innovation for Smart Cities in Asia’ at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai 2019.
The solution developed by the technology companies for Zhengzhou equips existing electric bikes with NB-IoT communications devices and GPS or BeiDou modules, which include anti-theft tracking, fire warning, power alarms, and traffic violation prevention.
It is widely deployed in Zhengzhou, with about three million electric bikes connected to the NB-IoT network, with theft and fire protection.
Huwaei said for operators, the system can reuse LTE network resources to greatly reduce deployment costs, while developing a large number of IoT users, and creating new revenue-generating services in partnership with transportation department and insurance companies.
For city management authorities, the system provides a tool to track and defeat theft, reduce the potential fire hazards, and achieve traffic monitoring, and improve urban traffic capacity.
And for electric bike riders, it provides positioning services that increase the efficiency of riding, safety through fire warnings, and security through anti-theft capabilities.
The GSMA award is actually the second for the project as it also won the ‘Innovative Mobile Service and Application’ award from GTI.
The award indicates that the NB-IoT ecosystem has become increasingly mature and will witness an explosive growth in commercial NB-IoT applications, according to Huawei.
Early this year, Huawei also shared how NB-IoT boosted Chinese unicorn ofo’s bike sharing business.
The company developed an IoT smart lock based on NB-IoT technology that “lowers power consumption, enables wide coverage, and slashes system resource delays at low cost,” according to Huawei.
