Fleet Size and the Parking Rules
Shared bikes, including shared e-bikes, fill a gap in short urban trips. The Ministry of Transport reported more than 20 million shared bikes on the street in China in 2023, and more than 400 million users. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Ministry of Transport, among others, have pushed operators toward geofences, designated parking, and a cap on how many bikes a city will allow. Each bike carries a smart lock on 4G/5G or NB-IoT so it can unlock, lock, report position, and bill the ride. iResearch estimates that nearly 100% of those locks are online. Cellular is the infrastructure the service runs on.
Core Pain Points
A lock that moves: Bikes travel through the city. Underground garages, tunnels, and outlying streets do not have even coverage, so the lock needs to switch carriers, and an e-bike lock has to be designed around the battery it already has. Peaks and delay: Morning and evening rushes pile unlocks into a short window. The platform and the network both have to absorb that burst without a long wait. Field work and rebalancing: Broken bikes and piles of idle bikes have to be found and moved. Position and status are what geofences and illegal-parking checks are built on.
Technical Standards and Terminology
Relevant documents include the Technical and Service Specification for Internet Bicycle Rental Systems and JT/T 1242, Technical Requirements for Internet Rental Bicycles. Common terms: 4G Cat.1/NB-IoT (the usual lock links — Cat.1 for e-bikes, NB-IoT for mechanical locks); geofence (a virtual parking area); M2M (device-to-platform communication); LBS (location-based services); OTA (over-the-air update). Unlock is expected in under 3 seconds. Peak-hour bursts need both the platform and the network. NB-IoT draws little power, and a mechanical lock can run 1–2 years on its battery. Typical operators: Hello Bike, Qingju, and Meituan Bike.
Deployments
One operator fitted 5 million bikes with 4G Cat.1 locks and switches carriers so garages and tunnels still open. Unlock success is 99.2%. Another fleet of 500,000 e-bikes reports battery level and position over Cat.1, and dispatch and maintenance are about 30% more productive.
Where IoT Is Used
Unlock and billing: After the scan, the cloud sends an unlock to the lock. At the end of the ride the lock closes and the charge is reported. The path has to be fast and it has to stay up.
Position and rebalancing: GPS and BeiDou positions show where bikes are clustered, warn of a pile-up, shape the truck routes, and enforce the geofence.
Faults and maintenance: Battery level, lock state, and fault codes identify a bike that should come off the street and open a work order.
Where the Market Is Heading
Shared e-bikes are taking a larger share of the fleet, which raises the bar on range and charge management. Ride data is being tied into slow-traffic plans and into bus and metro data. Battery-swap cabinets and charging posts for two-wheelers are coming online. Operators are also looking at Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Summary
A shared bike is a moving endpoint, and the ride starts only if the lock answers quickly. SimtoLink supplies 4G/5G and NB-IoT SIM cards and communication modules for this sector, including carrier switching and low-power designs, so locks stay online around the clock and operators can keep unlocks reliable without a heavier field crew.