Find Stolen PAYGo Assets with AirLink

Lost or stolen PAYGo assets are a persistent problem for the DRE market. Simusolar’s new open-source project AirLink makes it simple to track and locate missing assets, like solar water pumps. Now, we want to help more organisations adopt the software and help provide greater confidence and security for customers.

What is AirLink?

DRE companies working in last-mile communities face a challenging market. For PAYGo services to work, they require data connectivity and 2G coverage, which is limited in rural settings with the poor network coverage. It’s especially poor in remote farming communities where farmers and fishermen benefit most from productive use PAYGo products. Then, there’s the risk of asset theft and hacking of PAYGo controls. This common issue that customers face increases their costs and often results in a reluctance to buy or refer others to buy valuable productive use equipment.

This is where Simusolar is taking a leading-edge approach to solving connectivity and security issues for PAYGo devices, with their AirLink software. AirLink uses financed phones as relay-extensions of the internet in remote areas, to extend productive asset data coverage in even the most rural communities. By introducing open-standards communications, AirLink allows customers’ phones and PAYGo assets to communicate between themselves and each other using widely available, standard low-energy Bluetooth connectivity. This creates a common close-range communication standard that can be adopted across the DRE sector to capture and track data from PAYGo devices.

How can it help DRE companies?

Bluetooth is an inadequately tapped resource that can extend the reach of PAYGo and equipment Internet of Things data to off-grid communities. By extension, it can also provide data to track and locate stolen or lost PAYGo assets using proximity detection through other devices that have a common way of communicating. This is a huge potential benefit of having a common close-range communication standard adopted across the industry and is the driving force behind the AirLink project.

AirLink can track assets through transmission of location data, and verify asset ownership with local authorities, and if distributors decide to enable the feature, devices with displays can show the customer’s name. This boosts chances of asset recovery through both tracking location and verifying ownership.

More connected assets means better tracking

AirLink essentially offers a kind of neighbourhood watch that can read and communicate through the airwaves. AirLink connects PAYGo assets and devices with smartphones to create a rich bank of data and strengthen connectivity in off-grid communities. The more connected devices there are in an area, the better the tracking gets. Which is why AirLink is ideal for integration with smartphone and PAYGo product bundles.

Simusolar, backed by EnAccess, plans to actively market the open standards that are being developed to their existing and new equipment suppliers. This has the potential to drive a change towards secure, off-network, data-enabled assets being available as standard products in the productive use PAYGo space and create truly market-driven product development.

To help new companies, EnAccess is leading an initiative to give companies access to download AirLink through thingsboard.io 3 and upload data to the cloud IoT platform, free of charge. We want to see AirLink used universally following its launch in early 2022, so please tell us how we can help support your organizations. Head over to enaccess.org/airlink to get started or reach out to us for guidance.

Written by Rebecca Cooke