NB-IoT Electric Bikes in Zhengzhou Facilitate Urban Management and Wins the GTI Innovative Mobile Service and Application Award

[Barcelona, Spain, February 22, 2019] The NB-IoT electric bike management system jointly developed by China Mobile, Huawei, and Tendency (Zhejiang Tendency Technology Co., Ltd.) has won the GTI Award 2018 for ‘Innovative Mobile Service and Application’ at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019. 

The award lends industry-wide prestige and recognition to Huawei and China Mobile's constant contributions to NB-IoT ecosystem development, and also indicates that the NB-IoT ecosystem has become increasingly mature and will witness an explosive growth in commercial NB-IoT applications.

Award photo

Electric bike ownership has now exceeded 300 million units in China, but while this huge growth has helped people's lives, it has also brought problems for urban management. According to statistics provided by Zhengzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau, in 2017, 80% of city-wide reported thefts, over 30% of traffic accidents, and 9% of fire causes involved electric bikes.

To address these problems, China Mobile has been working with Huawei and Tendency on an NB-IoT electric bike management system. Multiple functions can be enabled by equipping existing electric bikes with NB-IoT communications devices and GPS or BeiDou modules. These functions include anti-theft tracking, fire warning, power alarms, and traffic violation prevention – allowing for intelligent urban traffic surveillance and control, and guaranteeing public security.

The NB-IoT electric bike management system has already been deployed in Zhengzhou, in China’s Henan Province, with more than two million NB-IoT-enabled anti-theft electric bikes being put into use. NB-IoT electric bikes have become the largest-scale NB-IoT application for a single service in the world and have opened up a blue ocean market for IoT applications. In fact the local government listed electric bike safety as a top ten livelihood improvement project in 2018. The project aimed to equip citywide electric bikes with anti-theft license plates and NB-IoT-enabled positioning devices. Within a month of the project being launched, a branch of Zhengzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau set up a dedicated team to efficiently crack down on the theft of licensed electric bikes. With this system, the successful clearance rate for electric bike theft increased to over 60%, helping to ensure the safety of electric bikes in the city.

This award from GTI not only embodies recognition of Huawei's NB-IoT solution, but also highlights the success of a mature NB-IoT ecosystem and the large-scale commercial deployment of NB-IoT. Huawei will continue to work closely with partners to further develop the NB-IoT industry, explore migration of IoT services from 2G or 3G to 4G and 5G, build all business connected LTE networks, and create and share IoT industry values.