Low cost alternative to GSM for data connectivity of Electric Vehicle Chargepoints

In the last 5 years the development and deployment of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE a.k.a. chargepoints) has seen a rapid growth driven by the arrival of EVs from many major vehicle manufacturers.
Addressing the need to provide recharging facilities to EV owners wherever they may travel has seen projects and funding throughout Europe explore what technologies and distribution of recharging facilities best suit EV ownership. The results of these projects regularly cite similar problems these being:
1: A lack of standardization in the interface of EVSE to a central control system or more specifically the attempts of EVSE manufacturers to ‘lock out’ access to control their equipment.
2: The issues of persistent connection between EVSE and a central control system when relying on mobile GSM coverage (GPRS, 3G or 4G) and more specifically the lack of coverage in some circumstances
3: The issues of accessibility; the predominant need for users of infrastructure to either pre-register or go through sign up procedures to gain access to infrastructure.
This project addresses these points but also provides an economical and extendable solution that can be applied to other areas of intelligent transport and traffic devices.
Our proposal is to harness the facilities of a user’s smartphone so that connection is made to a chargepoint directly via Bluetooth when a user wishes to use the facility and their phone data connection is used to channel data back to the central server from the chargepoint using the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) standard.