Belgian postal operator bpost has fitted every one of the 93,000 roll containers in its parcel network with a hybrid tag that carries both passive UHF RFID and Bluetooth Low Energy, and has cut its spending on replacement containers by 85% since the rollout. The deployment was detailed in a case story published by Danish tracking specialist Lyngsoe Systems in September 2026.
bpost is Belgium’s national postal operator, listed on Euronext Brussels, and it handles more than 500,000 parcels a day, rising above 800,000 in the December peak. Roll containers are the metal mesh carts that move those parcels inside and between distribution and sorting centres, each holding up to 30 items. At 93,000 units the pool is a capital asset nobody could previously count.
Why a pool of 93,000 carts is hard to manage
Roll cages do not sit still in one controlled environment. They pass through sorter chutes, staging areas, dock doors, vehicles and on to customer and partner sites, where they can linger for weeks. What bpost needed was not the position of one cage but a continuously updated picture of how the whole pool was distributed.
One housing, two air interfaces
Each cage carries a customised Beontag Viking Hybrid beacon. Beontag manufactures RFID inlays, labels and BLE beacons, and its published specification for the Viking Hybrid gives a 68 x 47 x 28 mm IP68 sealed housing that clips onto mesh panels up to 5 mm in diameter, with improved on-metal performance and a non-replaceable coin cell rated beyond ten years. The passive side is an NXP UCODE 9xm working across the global 865 to 928 MHz band, which puts it squarely in UHF RAIN RFID territory. The active side is an InPlay IN100 radio broadcasting BLE at 2.4 GHz in Eddystone and iBeacon frame formats. Beontag quotes ranges of up to 10 m for RFID and up to 70 m for BLE.
The split of duties follows the physics. Passive RFID gives fast, precise, power-free identification at fixed process points such as dock doors and portals, where cages pass a known reader in bulk. BLE, a low-power radio protocol for battery devices that advertise their identity to any listener in range, covers the wide areas in between: buildings, vehicle interiors and external sites with no portal. GPS fixes from bpost’s own mobile devices add outdoor and customer-site positioning, so a cage parked at a retailer does not vanish.
Turning raw reads into trustworthy events
Three technologies reporting independently produce a great deal of noise. Lyngsoe LIVE takes readings from all of them, filters duplicate and adjacent reads, validates and enriches the data, then applies business logic to turn it into logistics events staff can act on. Above that sits Lyngsoe’s Asset Flow Management application, software that tracks the reusable containers themselves rather than the goods inside them, presenting one view of inventory, arrivals and departures, flows between locations, dwell times, assets in transit, container histories and tag health.
What the 85% figure actually means
Because bpost now knows how many containers it has and where they are, it can use them harder. Since the project began the operator has cut its purchases of new containers, and the associated budget, by 85% with no impact on operations, and Lyngsoe states the investment has already paid for itself. Live and historical data also expose slow-moving assets and long dwell times, which lets bpost chase down underused cages and hold internal and external sites to account for the ones in their yards. The same data shapes transport flows during peak, when the company can intervene early if a local shortage or surplus is building.
From container visibility to parcel visibility
The more interesting extension is linking each parcel to the cage it travels in. Do that and every container movement becomes an extra tracking event through sorting, staging, loading, transport and arrival, with no separate manual parcel scan at each stage. For the indoor precision that needs, bpost is exploring BLE Angle of Arrival, which measures the direction a signal arrives from across a multi-element antenna array to derive a bearing and so a position, rather than inferring proximity to a receiver. Combined with parcel, manifest and RFID data, that could pin down the sorter chute, buffer area or staging lane a cage occupies, and flag an incorrect container before it is loaded. Lyngsoe says the platform can extend to reusable bulk bags and last-mile e-bikes.
Shortlisted in London, pipped in the category
The project was shortlisted for Transportation Innovation of the Year at the Parcel and Postal Technology International Awards, whose ceremony was held in London on 23 September 2026. bpost did not take the category: it went to Pošta Slovenije for its PS Delivery Points platform. bpost did win that evening, sharing Environmental Achievement of the Year with telematics company Geotab, but for a separate CO2-neutral last-mile fleet project, not container tracking.
Lyngsoe Systems was founded in 1952 and is based in Aars, Denmark. Comparable postal deployments it names include Posti with more than 100,000 roll cages and Swiss Post with 600 RFID portals covering 70,000 containers. More of the same sit in our case studies, logistics and asset tracking sections.
