Roole, a major French supplemental auto insurance company and the country’s leading car club, has taken its anti-theft service to a whole new level, offering its customers a next-generation 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 specializing 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.
GETTING AROUND THE GPS JAMMER PROBLEM
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, WiFi 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.
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.
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