More than 22 years ago, I left the telecommunications industry to join a team in Vienna that was building what was to become the largest new multi-lane free-flow (MLFF) tolling system in the world.
Austria launched its nationwide truck tolling system (LKW Maut) in 2004, exactly one year before its favourite rival, Germany. Back then, there was a fierce debate about the microwave-based versus satellite-based approach to determining distance-based fees. Now, in 2025, 10 nationwide truck tolling systems are based on satellite technology while Austria and Slovenia still operate systems based on dedicated short-range communications (DSRC).
France and the Netherlands are currently rolling out satellite-based systems, while Lithuania and Romania are procuring truck tolling systems based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS).
Satellite solutions come out ahead
There is now a clear preference for using GNSS for nationwide tolling, since this technology has proven to be highly cost-effective and extremely flexible.
With satellite positioning, there is no need to build gantries on each individual toll section of the tolled road network as required by a “tag and beacon” system that needs DSRC or RFID readers at each tolling point. In fact, when the Czech Republic replaced its DSRC tolling technology with GNSS in 2019, it removed more than 100 gantries equipped with costly microwave equipment, cutting operational expenses in half while doubling the tolled road network – and thus increasing the overall toll revenue.
With a GNSS-based approach, gantries are built on approximately 10% of the total tolled road sections – for enforcement purposes. The rest of the tolled road network is monitored by mobile enforcement vehicles that move around the tolled road network to catch potential violators by surprise. MLFF systems using DSRC technology also use mobile enforcement to catch vehicles that are not equipped with active tolling tags.
Impact of European Electronic Toll Service
We have come a long way since Germany started tolling trucks for using the famous Autobahn network of 12,000 km – which has now been expanded to the entire national road network of 52,000 km and generates about €12 billion ($15 billion) in toll revenues per year.
Thanks to the introduction of the European Electronic Toll Service (EETS) in Belgium in 2016, there are now 14 countries that accept an EETS on-board unit (OBU) from one of many toll service providers (TSPs) offering the service.
“There is a risk that a truck driver may forget to activate or deactivate the smartphone app when starting or ending a trip”
Truck-forwarding companies can register with a single provider to travel with one OBU in many (if not all) of these countries: Switzerland (2001), Germany (2005), Slovakia (2010), Hungary (2013), Russia (2015), Belgium (2016), Czech Republic (2019), Bulgaria (2020), Poland (2021), Denmark (2025).
Of course, that service comes at a cost, which a growing number of trucking companies are ready to pay for – rather than having to register their vehicles in each country that they travel in, and managing all those different invoices. The European toll domains still provide a service – typically from a national service provider – that allows trucks to use the tolled road network without a service fee. Now that EETS interoperability is well established, fewer windscreens of European trucks are cluttered with the multiple OBUs that were required for each individual country.
Smartphones have entered the scene
When Poland replaced its microwave-based tolling system with GNSS in 2021, it boldly introduced the use of a smartphone app as a free alternative to using a paid service from one of many TSPs that provide an OBU or a tracking device for making toll declarations while using the tolled road network. The Polish agency responsible for the operation of the e-Toll system, the Department of Road Toll Collection at the Ministry of Finance, has published statistics about the use of different options for toll declarations.
As illustrated in Figure 1, in the first half of 2025, only 6% of all the trucks (and buses) processed toll transactions using the free smartphone app while driving on tolled roads. Since trucking companies have a fleet of vehicles, and a staff of drivers for those vehicles, it is clearly more convenient to have a dedicated device installed in each - rather than every truck driver installing an app and declaring their smartphone is associated with the specific vehicle that they are currently using. There is also a risk that a truck driver may forget to activate or deactivate the smartphone app when starting or ending a trip. Not having an active OBU or correctly-registered app while using the tolled road network can result in high penalties that would quickly exceed the cost of a having a dedicated tolling OBU.
If we look at the statistics for a specific segment of vehicles, the case for using the smartphone app is much more convincing. During the first half of 2025, among 74,600 smaller commercial trucks in Poland (between 3.5t and 12t) the smartphone app was clearly the most popular choice - as illustrated in Figure 2. Even though this is a relatively small sector of the total amount of 1.6 million registered vehicles, it demonstrates the potential of the smartphone – in this case, for small local businesses making deliveries within the country.
This year, Denmark became the second country to introduce a smartphone app for a nationwide truck tolling system. The “KmToll” (in Danish: Vejafgifter) covers about 10,900 km of Danish state and municipal roads, and applies to trucks above 12t. The system is the first in Europe that does not have a national “main service provider” but relies on the use of EETS OBUs, with a smartphone app and a simple ticketing system as alternatives.
Fortunately, the state-owned toll operator Sund & Bælt did not need to rely on private EETS providers supplying enough OBUs to meet the demand in Denmark since one of the EETS providers, Brobizz, is also 100% state-owned. The take-up of EETS OBUs was actually higher than originally anticipated.
In the overall statistics in Denmark (Figure 3), the smartphone app has not made much of an impact so far. Within the first months of operation, only 1% of the total distance driven by all vehicles were declared with the app offered by Brobizz. From January to the end of July, only 12.2 million transactions were made with the app – compared to 1.7 billion with an EETS OBU (93%), and 70.4 million with tickets (6%) booked for each individual trip.
Of the three current EETS providers, only Brobizz offers the smartphone app – which has been taken up by just 10% of users. This percentage will increase as the app – currently just on the iOS platform for iPhones – becomes available on android devices as well. In other words, there is much potential for smartphones apps being used in Denmark.
Will smartphones eventually replace tolling OBUs?
Since virtually all road users in Europe - and elsewhere in the world - own a smartphone, each with a built-in GNSS receiver, it seems logical to use the geo-positioning of smartphones rather than having to manufacture, distribute and install dedicated GNSS devices.
In recent years, GNSS-based tolling OBUs in Europe have had a price tag of about €100 ($115) for road authorities and EETS providers. The use of smartphones did little to reduce the number of OBUs needed, with just 76,000 registered smartphone users in Poland and 8,000 in Denmark in mid-2025. If a new tolling system required millions of dedicated OBUs, on the other hand, the cost could be quite substantial.
In Indonesia, a new GNSS-based solution was developed to replace the existing toll plazas on the national highway network, requiring about 50 million (!) users to be equipped with a GNSS device.
In 2021, the Indonesian government awarded a contract to a Hungarian consortium to build a satellite-based solution on the entire tolled motorway network of 2,578 km. This groundbreaking project would replace all toll plazas with a new MLFF system based on GNSS.
Since this project has faced delays, we don’t know yet how operating such a novel tolling system would look in practice. A new system, in which tens of millions of drivers would use a smartphone app to automatically recognise the distance travelled on toll roads, would surely face many challenges.
In contrast, the cost of supplying 50 million users with OBUs would be huge: even if the price of a GNSS OBU would be just $50 , the total cost would reach $2.5 billion.
‘No free lunch’ principle
In the era of toll service providers, road operators may not need to bear the cost of dedicated OBUs, since TSPs would cover that investment. For a monthly subscription fee, TSPs provide road users with a tolling OBU for automatic electronic toll declarations. This works well for trucks using EETS in Europe, but users can still choose between a free national service and a paid service.
Road authorities in Europe need to invest in a national service provider while at the same time paying a commission to the EETS providers for their services of calculating and collecting the distance-based fees using accredited OBUs. It remains to be seen how readily passenger car owners will subscribe to such a service, compared to using a smartphone app for free. The bigger question is what the main cost driver would be for road authorities: investing in dedicated toll OBUs (either directly or through a provider), or allowing the road users to download an app and pay for higher operation costs.
With a smartphone app, both the vehicle owners and the road authorities take on considerable risks. The road user takes complete responsibility for properly installing and using the app on their smartphones, and carelessness will inevitably result in having to pay penalties for toll evasions – whether intentional or not. Road authorities, on the other hand, need to invest more in enforcing the correct use of smartphones. The moment that toll declarations are not automatically made with tolling OBUs, but rely on any type of smartphone that is - literally - in the hands of regular car drivers, the potential for inaccurate trip declarations will increase dramatically. Imagine the level of customer service needed to deal with all the queries from confused and frustrated smartphone users - and all the excuses why the app or the phone wasn’t working. In other words, there is no free lunch. We have yet to see how the cost of operating a large customer service organisation – with a very busy call center – would compare to the cost of manufacturing and distributing special-purpose OBUs that take care of all toll declarations automatically.
Plug and play
As the statistics from Poland and Denmark have shown, truck forwarding companies clearly prefer using a tolling OBU, especially when a single service provider can take care of all registration and payment issues in multiple European countries. Smartphone apps, on the other hand, only work for a specific toll domain - as is the case with Poland and Denmark, with Lithuania most likely to follow. Since EETS providers need to have the hardware and software of their OBU solutions thoroughly tested in each country, they typically apply for the accreditation of a single OBU configuration. With a smartphone, there is not a specific hardware, since any available smartphone can be used. Whereas GNSS OBUs are designed and manufactured with the requirements of the toll domains in mind, smartphone manufacturers are focused on the consumer market - and not on the specific needs of tolling systems.
“It is probably just a matter of time before geo-positioning becomes the basis for measuring road usage and financing road infrastructure”
A key advantage of dedicated GNSS OBUs is the “plug and play” approach, with the simple installation and handling of a windshield-mounted device. The more automated the entire process is, the smoother tolling operations will be. Once the OBU is installed, there is virtually no need for any user intervention. In the case of an OBU hardware or software failure, the driver can be notified by an alarm and a red warning light on the OBU.
Tolling OBUs also meet strict automotive requirements, such as high levels of vibration and the ability to withstand very high, and very low, temperatures.
Travel data is securely stored and sent in data packages of the needed trip information to a tolling back office, and are usually tamper-proof. Road users cannot simply turn off an OBU or open the casing to remove the OBU’s SIM card or the back-up battery to prevent trip data from being submitted to the tolling back office, where the distance-based are calculated and invoiced.
Potential downside of smartphone apps
Smartphone apps face significant challenges when used for distance-based tolling. Road users are required to download the app, correctly register their vehicle, and activate the app before driving on a toll road.
Whenever the road user drives a different vehicle, they need to register that change in their app. They must also ensure that their smartphones have enough power for the entire duration of the trip, and that enough memory is available on the device to store the travel data when there is no cell coverage or poor data connectivity along the travelled route.
Smartphone users also need to make sure that their telecom service has a sufficient data package for all the travel data to be properly transferred to the toll system. Users must also secure their phones against malicious malware attacks and be wary of fraudulent apps that pretend to be the actual tolling app, with toll charges going to an illegal entity until the fraud is eventually identified.
The position accuracy of a smartphone is particularly vital to the correct calculation of distance-based fees. The quality of geo-positioning provided by different phone models can vary significantly. Even with the best smartphones on the market, accuracy can suffer greatly if the smartphone is not placed near the front windshield. When a smartphone is tucked away in a driver’s pocket, bag, or somewhere in the back seat, position accuracy will not be very reliable.
Although smartphone apps are a viable option for automated toll declaration in a large tolling scheme, their acceptance has been limited so far. From the perspective of a road authority, the chances of something going wrong with the collection of correct and accurate trip data is so much greater with a smartphone, compared to plug-and-play device.
The way ahead
The evolution of multi-lane free flow tolling over the past 20 years has been substantial. Within the next 20 years, electronic tolling will likely change more rapidly. We can already imagine using multiple sources of geo-positioning in the vehicle for the purpose of road pricing.
Virtually all new cars are equipped with GNSS receivers that could provide a secure and accurate source of travel data to determine the distance travelled on a tolled road – or on any type of road. With the rise of electric vehicles in the market, it seems inevitable that distance-based charging of vehicles will become essential as fuel tax revenues steadily decline.
“Only time will tell whether the smartphone alternative to tolling OBUs can result in significant savings or ease of use in the long run”
It is probably just a matter of time before geo-positioning becomes the basis for measuring road usage and financing road infrastructure, and the transmission of travel data from all vehicles on public roads becomes commonplace.
Smartphone apps may find a suitable place in the mix of tolling hardware in the years to come, but at this early stage it is difficult to predict the role of smartphones in distance-based road pricing.
Only time will tell whether the smartphone alternative to tolling OBUs can result in significant savings or ease of use in the long run.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norbert Schindler is founder of GNSS Consulting
www.gnss-consulting.com
