Skymeter minimizes total cost of ownership for metering

A Mass Market Solution:

Skymeter has designed a system and service to minimize expenses, hence operate in millions of cars, supporting the firm's vision. The ultimate target is a cost similar to credit card systems: a few percent of the transaction value. Even today, Skymeter offers better total cost for wide-area applications than conventional parking and tolling metering systems, which can cost 50% or more of the funds collected.

Minimizing Each Service Cost Element:

Four types of costs matter with metering systems: direct infrastructure costs, direct operations costs, enforcement costs and revenue losses. Skymeter, for the price of more in-car infrastructure, minimizes the other three costs and maximizes revenue.

Besides single-application cost advantages, Skymeter is a generic in-car meter, that measures what a car does, for multiple uses. With Skymeter, you can halve the cost of a system for one use by doubling the uses. Combine parking and green driving together, for instance. Partners who work with Skymeter can develop a large cost advantage relative to single-purpose transport payment firms.

Infrastructure and Installation Costs: as a Financial GPS system, Skymeter reads satellite signals available worldwide for free. It requires no roadside metering infrastructure. This offers a potentially huge capital cost savings to charge a large area. In-vehicle installation costs are also minimized with Skymeter. The in-car meter can be self-installed by the driver for free, installed by low-skilled staff in a couple of minutes, or installed professionally in a fraction of an hour. Customers choose the method they prefer.

Operations Costs: non-financial systems with billing errors can have high collections costs; Skymeter's metering service verifies every transaction before billing to minimize this cost. Data processing and communications costs are also minimized through Skymeter's smart architecture. Some suppliers offer a privacy-violating "thin" in-car meter with high data costs; others offer a "thick" in-car meter that scales poorly to tens of thousands of cars and constantly changing roads. Skymeter is designed to handle all these situations.

Enforcement Costs: Skymeter enables visual, license plate, wireless and back office enforcement. In all cases, it is recommended that random enforcement is used, just as we do for speeding. The lowest cost, highest efficiency system is often a few roving vehicles with license plate cameras and automatic ticket printers. Contact us for details.

Revenue Losses: standard GPS charging systems can high revenue losses from an inability to collect. Skymeter verifies every charge to eliminate these losses. Skymeter also has multiple levels of security to minimize losses due to fraud. And by offering a system designed for driver acceptability, Skymeter maximizes adoption of this lower cost technology. Adoption covers the largest cost - the opportunity cost of not metering. The business community loses billions of dollars to traffic jams; the environment suffers from massive greenhouse gas emissions; and cities run deficits to provide expensive parking and road infrastructure "for free".

Skymeter helps turn cost centers into low-expense revenue centers, transforming the bottom line.