Tunja city, Colombia, has deployed an IoT project of city taxis fleet tracking and safety, in order to provide the drivers with a mean of self-protection. The solution, initiated by Iluminacion, a Colombian provider of IoT and renewable energy solutions, is based on Abeeway tracking devices and ultra-low-power LoRaWAN connectivity for data transfer.
Finding a way to increase drivers’ safety
The Tunja city has a fleet of roughly 1200 taxis. The drivers are independent and pay for the vehicles with their own money. Which means in case of aggression or theft of their vehicle they incur financial loss and have no protection. There is no efficient call number for police to take immediate action.
The Tunja City Administration was looking for a solution and approached Ilumination.co, which led to a initial ongoing pilot project, covering the first batch of 200 taxis being tracked across the city. The city has already approved the deployment of 1000 more taxis. The project is based on Abeeway Micro Trackers that are connected to the lighter of the car for constant power supply and provide location information every 3 minutes throughout the day.
The Panic Button of the tracker plays a crucial role as it allows drivers to alert the police forces and be located very fast. On the other hand, the police department is interested in deploying the trackers on their own vehicles fleet for real-time location and dispatch.
Network technology combined with a flexible tracking solution
The reason a LoRaWAN-based solution has convinced the city officials is its uncontestable coverage advantages over cellular networking technologies like 4G which happens to present a lot of blind spots. Conventional cellular-based GPS devices do not work everywhere, and, furthermore, their radio signal can be easily jammed, facilitating theft.
LoRaWAN is a widely used wireless communication technology, which makes use of unlicensed radio spectrum and allows battery-powered sensors to communicate with IoT applications across a very long-range while supporting low data rates.
LoRaWAN came to be handy for this city, which presents a difficult geographical environment with mountains, hills and high buildings. It’s more cheaper than cellular or satellite networks. LoRaWAN 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. Moreover, just a couple gateways enable covering huge areas and deploying IoT use cases without a cost and delay.
Benefiting from LoRaWAN’s characteristics, Abeeway provides long autonomy devices that allow continuous usage for months and years. The devices work both indoors and outdoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, integrating standard and Abeeway’s patented Low-power GPS, Wi-Fi sniffing, Bluetooth Low Energy beaconing feature for precise indoor tracking.
It turned out that the GPS coverage in Tunja is due to its overall altitude of over 2,800 metres above sea level. The positions are received with no chance of failure, while the usage of LoRaWAN allows to avoid all disruption in communication: all location points are retrieved and allow to get the transit data in any case.
Abeeway devices combine location technologies, hardware, a selection of high-performing low-power chipsets and the no-compromise optimisation of software. This allows flexible behavior, highly responsive to changing needs, and guaranteeing asset and people location in various coverage scenarios.
Ginette Cardozo, commercial director at Iluminacion.co SAS, says “Honored to be one of the first projects in Latin America implementing IOT to enhance security and public service. Colombia is a great country of opportunity and capability for growth within technology and this IOT implementation showcased that traditional issues can be overcome with new technology.”
Olivier Hersent, CEO at Actility, says “At Actility, we are honored to have been a part of the Tunja city IoT project by providing our innovative Abeeway tracking devices using LoRaWAN connectivity. It is heartening to know that our technology has played a significant role in increasing the safety and security of taxi drivers in Tunja. We are proud to have contributed to this project and hope that it will serve as an inspiration for other cities to adopt similar IoT solutions for their communities.”
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