Final testing of SUNA broadcast traffic alerts

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 14 August 2007 13:51

IT Industry - Strategy

"Once the connection is there, there's a range of things you can provide" such as parking and fuel information, he added.

The service is not offered to the public by Intelematics, instead it is wholesaled to navigation system vendors who can offer it as an additional service to their customers. A "lifetime" subscription is likely to add between $A200 and $A300 to the cost of a navigation unit.

While unencrypted TMC is common in Europe, Game said the encrypted version was being used in Australia to preserve the vendors' business model.

While the company will also be offering an XML feed that could be delivered by GPRS or 3G, Game pointed out that the costs involved for those channels make them more suitable for 'pull' content as opposed to the stream of data delivered by TMC at zero marginal cost to the recipient.

An interoperability agreement between map vendors, hardware manufacturers and Intelematic was reached after 18 months of negotiations, paralleling those in Europe and North America.

Apart from helping individual drivers to reduce their journey times by avoiding trouble spots, the service may have a broader benefit. Game points out that most roads function well until they come within a few percent of their capacity, so moving a small proportion of vehicles onto alternative routes can make a big difference. With traffic expected to double during the next 20 years, systems like this can be a cost-effective way of reducing congestion.