Concord, Mass. — TomTom plans to bring live sharing of traffic information to personal navigation device (PND) users.
The company’s High Definition (HD) Traffic service, already available in Europe, delivers updates five times more often than standard live traffic services and covers 10 times as many roads, the company said. “We’re definitely looking at bringing High Definition traffic to this continent,” TomTom president Jocelyn Vigreux said.
To deliver the service, TomTom offers PNDs with GSM SIM cards. The PNDs collect road-speed data as the user drives and sends it off to TomTom, which aggregates the speed data from multiple users and broadcasts it to similarly equipped PNDs in the form of traffic updates.
The upcoming Dash Express service offers similar capabilities.
HD Traffic is available in the Netherlands in partnership with carrier Vodafone and is being rolled out to Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
