Bike Sharing Made Easier and More Energy-Efficient with T Connect

Telekom Connect: Thanks to LTE-M, DB Call a Bike’s bikes are easier to hire. Hiring is faster, the bikes are more energy-efficient, and that makes sustainable mobility easier to use and more cost-efficient.

“Telekom’s IoT technology enables us to offer our customers a state-of-the-art user experience that does justice to the high quality of our bikes. In addition, we can now make our service more economical and more efficient.”

Cornelius Kiermasch, Head of Shared Mobility, DB Call a Bike

Challenge

Call a Bike is Deutsche Bahn’s bike sharing service. Hiring a bike used to involve generating a code on your smartphone. The code was then entered on the bike. It was a multistage process, due in part to the less than optimal network technology used by the bikes.

Solution

Deutsche Telekom helped DB Call a Bike to optimize the interplay of components with new electronic locks and a new backend solution and networking. It is now fitting out the entire DB Call a Bike fleet with LTE-M-enabled SIM cards and providing the matching network. DB Call a Bike will in future also use Telekom’s IoT Solution Optimizer.

Customer benefit

End customers can unlock the bikes in next to no time by scanning the QR code on the lock. Thanks to LTE-M’s higher energy efficiency and other factors such as solar panels on the bikes DB Call a Bike no longer needs to collect its bikes and recharge them so often. Longer deployment availability boosts value creation. The IoT Solution Optimizer enables the company first to test new developments on digital twins of its bikes. That saves both time and resources.