Tomtom launches HD Traffic in South Africa

mvl

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Just in time for the World Cup, gpsbusinessnews is reporting that Tomtom has launched HD Traffic in South Africa.

This is their first "HD Traffic" launch where they are not using Vodafone. They are not using cellprobes at all. Instead they're using feedback from a leading stolen vehicle recovery vendor.

Seems like they're willing to be creative to launch new HD traffic models. And potentially blurring the line with branding of the service.

I don't know the market penetration of their vendor, but my opinion is that if GPS probes are in 10% of cars, and cars include vehicles that don't have a traffic service (so some still get into jams). Then when added to IQroutes, it should produce the reliability/accuracy people expect of cellprobe-based HD traffic.
 
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I guess they can call it whatever they wish, since there's no definition of what HDTraffic is. Even our expectations of it may differ widely. As for whether 10% of vehicles in South Africa have gps probes installed by Tracker, it's actually closer to 6% of registered vehicles (eNaTIS -National Traffic Information System - Home). In any case, I'll agree with MVL that TomTom may be willing to be somewhat creative in what they will consider HDTraffic from here on. So that would change my opinion on whether TomTom will ever offer something called "HDTraffic" for North America. I believe they will. Perhaps just not the European-style HD that some of us might have been expecting.
 
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Your right . Why can't tomtom do some type of high definition in the USA Come on, they have the nerve to call south Africa high def. Give us our version with the way we drive as well as your top of the line tomtom 1000 for this country. Why must I contemplate changing to the garmin 3790 series. I would love to buy a tomtom.
 
TrafficCast is supposed to be increasing their traffic coverage at some point.

I've corresponded with someone at TrafficCast who says they have this ready to go (see page 6 of the pdf below) but (although I don't know what this means) the delay has something to do with 'market priorities'.

The increased coverage will cover more roads in markets they already serve plus a lot of areas they do not cover now.

The response from TrafficCast is below along with the link. I have to believe they have a new source of data probes - maybe Blackberries in order to pull this off.

I believe that TomTom will buy one or more US traffic providers at some point in order to implement some form of HD Traffic here.

===============================================================
The expanded Dynaflow does both: adds density and further broadens coverage. About the latter, it?s not so much outlying areas, but connecting the urban markets via the main route corridors. Added density, however, does fill in some of those markets with additional arterial detail.

Cell probes are considerably more challenging in the US than China due to data sampling requirements. In China, you can sufficiently sample through the dominant cellular provider. Here you would need at least two if not three carriers. GPS Tracking data is more efficient.

http://www.itsmidwest.org/events/2009/pdfs/TrafficCast_kiernan_ITSMW09.pdf
 

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