Deutsche Telekom has signed a nearly double-digit million euro contract with cargo monitoring service arviem to offer a pay-as-you-go tracking solution for freight consignments.

Deutsche Telekom will provide the hardware and the SIM cards – which will record and relay environmental conditions like temperature, humidity or vibrations – and identify the container’s position to within 30 metres by GPS.

arviems software then evaluates the data and sends it to the customer by e-mail or on an online dashboard. As the technology is not fixed to the containers, customers can book per consignment to reduce the cost of shipping.

Today, of the 16m containers sent around the world every day, around 30 per cent arrive either damaged or late.

“For Deutsche Telekom, M2M is one of its most important strategic growth areas. We rely on strong partners in order to be able to offer a wide range of solutions and services for different industries and application scenarios. Cooperation with arviem is an important milestone in this process,” said Jürgen Hase, head of Deutsche Telekom’s M2M Competence Center.