Roole, a French supplemental auto insurance company and the car club, has taken its anti-theft service to a whole new level, offering its customers a geolocation solution coupled with a mobile app, called Wetrak, to find lost or stolen cars, thereby reducing insurance costs. The solution is based on advanced location devices provided by Abeeway, a subsidiary of Actility specialising in low-power indoor and outdoor fused geolocation.
With an estimated 50% share of the French market with over one million active policyholders, Roole is thinking big. Leveraging IoT technologies such as LoRaWAN connectivity and Abeeway’s geolocation expertise, the company is poised to transform the market by offering an unparalleled quality of service, distributed through car dealerships in France, and offering a game-changing feature of non-sensitivity to today’s jammers, unlike ordinary cellular GPS devices.
With a successful first phase of 4,000 devices deployed, and the service becoming popular, the company is launching a massive consumer car tracking offering with over 20,000 devices as a second phase.
Outsmarting car thieves’ jamming practices thanks to IoT
Traditional GPS trackers for vehicles rely on cellular networks (GSM) to transmit their signals. They used to be the gold standard in car theft protection. But today, it has become surprisingly easy for thieves to jam or mask their signals so that the police can’t find them.
A GPS jammer is a generally small, inexpensive, self-contained transmitter device capable of sending radio signals within a short radius using various frequency bands (2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, Lojack, GPS, Wi-Fi and BLE), rendering it unable to determine its position due to interference and transmit data using these common networks. Less savvy thieves know they can interrupt tracking if they hide a stolen car in an underground garage or steel shipping container. They can also use a portable digital radio frequency (RF) detector to find a tracking device in the vehicle and remove it completely.
So, to overcome this problem, Abeeway GPS trackers send very short, low-power radio signals via the LoRaWAN network. Thieves cannot use jamming devices to disable LoRaWAN transmissions, and they will not be able to find Abeeway devices using an RF detector.
Coupling unrivaled network technology with a versatile tracking solution
LoRaWAN network technology is a widely used wireless protocol that leverages the unlicensed radio spectrum and enables battery-powered sensors to communicate with IoT applications via ultra-low data rate and long range, consuming very little power and allowing batteries to run longer. Because the LoRa radio signal is emitted over a wide spectral range, it greatly reduces the risk of interference from unwanted signals.
Most importantly, LoRa transmissions can pass through glass, metal, and concrete, allowing data to be sent not only outdoors, but also deep indoors and underground, which is a definite advantage for an anti-theft solution.
For Wetrak service in France, Roole is using the nationwide public LoRaWAN network provided by Orange, and powered by Actility’s ThingPark Wireless platform.
Benefiting from LoRaWAN features, Abeeway’s long-life wireless devices allow continuous use for months and years: 2 years with 2 positions per day. The devices work both indoors and outdoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, integrating regular GPS, Abeeway’s patented Low-power GPS, Wi-Fi Sniffing, Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth LE Beaconing for accurate indoor tracking.
Abeeway devices combine state-of-the-art location technologies, robust hardware, meticulous selection of high-performance low-power chipsets and uncompromising software optimization. This allows for flexible behavior, highly responsive to changing needs, and ensures the location of goods and people in a variety of coverage scenarios.
Finally, the service integrates the white-labeled Abeeway Mobile App. This user-friendly mobile app allows visualization of the current locations of multiple devices on a map, of the location history of a device on a map, but also geofencing & alarms (SOS, Motion, Leaving/entering geofenced zones), and even location sharing with other users.
Finally, the service integrates the Abeeway mobile application in white label. This user-friendly application allows users to view the current location of multiple devices on a map, the history of a device’s location, but also geofencing and alarms (SOS, movement, exit/entry of geofenced areas), and even sharing the location with other users.
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