Telematics Devices: What They Are and How They Work

In this context, a telematics device is a monitoring unit for commercial equipment: excavators, dumpers, generators, lighting towers, CCTV towers, pumps, battery systems and similar assets. It is not the insurance black box fitted to a private car to score driving behaviour, although both use similar location and cellular technology.

The job of the device is to turn an asset that can only be checked in person into one that reports its own condition. It might send a position every few minutes while moving, a battery reading every quarter of an hour, and an immediate message when an alarm is triggered.

Telematics means monitoring something at a distance by combining telecommunications and informatics: a device on the asset gathers data, a mobile or satellite network carries it, and software turns it into maps, reports and alerts. In simple terms, telematics lets an asset tell you where it is and how it is doing without anyone having to go and look.

The word is a blend of "telecommunications" and "informatics". It is most often associated with vehicle fleets and car insurance, but the same approach is used for construction plant, generators, CCTV towers, pumps, battery systems and other equipment that sits on remote or temporary sites.

Every telematics system follows the same three steps, whatever it is monitoring.

A telematics control unit, or TCU, is the on-board unit at the heart of a telematics system. It reads data from the asset's electronics and sensors, works out its position from satellites, and sends everything over a mobile network to a cloud platform. In other words, it is the telematics device itself.

Most articles about TCUs describe the units built into new cars by manufacturers such as BMW or Ford. Industrial TCUs do the same job for plant and site equipment: they are usually retrofitted, run from a 12V or 24V supply, and read machine and controller data over CAN bus, RS485 / Modbus or simple GPIO inputs rather than a car's internal network.

Most devices share the same basic building blocks, whatever the brand. What varies is the number and type of inputs, the connectivity options and how rugged the enclosure is.

A device on its own knows little beyond location and movement. The useful detail comes from what it is connected to. Telematics sensors can be built into the unit, fitted separately, or already present on the equipment and read through a data connection.

The technology is similar across uses, but what is measured and why differs.

UK construction, hire and security operators use telematics mainly to cut unnecessary site visits, reduce theft and keep equipment available. Typical uses include finding plant across multiple sites, billing hire on actual running hours, scheduling servicing on engine hours rather than guesswork, checking a generator's fuel or a tower's battery before it runs out, and getting an alert if equipment moves out of hours.

On remote and temporary sites the biggest saving is often avoided journeys: knowing whether a fault is a flat battery, a lost signal or a genuine equipment failure before an engineer is dispatched.

GPS tracking answers one question: where is it? Telematics answers that and more: is it running, how many hours has it done, is the battery healthy, has an alarm triggered, has it been tilted or moved. A GPS tracker is effectively the simplest form of telematics device.

The data falls into a few groups. Location data covers position, speed and geofence entry or exit. Usage data covers running hours, idle time and duty cycles. Health data covers battery voltage, fuel, temperatures and fault codes. Event data covers alarms, tilt, movement out of hours and loss of power.

Devices usually send routine readings on a schedule and events immediately. How often they report is a trade-off between detail, data cost and power use, which matters most on assets without a permanent power supply. Data is typically sent to a cloud platform using protocols such as MQTT, and from there it can feed dashboards, alerts or your own systems through an API.

Cloud telematics means the data from each device is stored and processed in an online platform rather than on a local server or on the device itself. Anyone with access can open the same live view from an office, a van or a phone, and the history builds up automatically without anyone downloading data from site.

A cloud platform is also what makes mixed fleets manageable. Devices on different assets, from different manufacturers, report into one place, where alert rules, reports and integrations are set once for the whole fleet. Good platforms protect that data with authentication and encryption in transit, and let you pull it into your own systems through MQTT or an API.

Many new machines come with telematics fitted by the manufacturer (OEM). These have direct access to the machine's systems and are well suited to brand-specific data. The drawback is that each manufacturer has its own portal, and older machines or non-plant assets are not covered.

Retrofit or aftermarket devices are fitted after purchase. They can go on almost any asset, including generators, towers and pumps, and can report into a single platform regardless of brand. The trade-off is that they only see what they are wired to, so installation matters.

Start with the assets and the questions you want answered, then work back to the device. A generator in a compound, a CCTV tower on a remote site and a battery system in a welfare unit have different needs.

TrackSyte's Neo 2 gateway is an example of a retrofit device designed for mixed site equipment. It has Ethernet, RS485, Modbus, CAN bus and GPIO inputs, runs from any 9–30 V DC supply, includes Bluetooth, LTE, LTE-M and NB-IoT cellular, and full-constellation GNSS as standard. It works with Victron equipment, smart lithium battery management systems and the Victron Smart Shunt, and sends data over MQTT or API using authentication, TLS and certificates into the TrackSyte Portal.