Vodafone Italy to TomTom real-time traffic

BERLIN: TomTom and Vodafone Italy have announced an exclusive agreement to bring TomTom HD Traffic and TomTom’s LIVE Services to Italy. HD Traffic is TomTom’s real-time traffic service that claims to give the most accurate and up-to-date traffic information in the world.

HD Traffic is part of TomTom’s LIVE Services that deliver essential information services to motorists helping them save time, money and fuel, says a press release. The services are expected to be available in Italy from mid 2010.

In order to be able to provide such accurate real-time information on all Italy’s major and secondary roads, TomTom’s patented HD Traffic technology uses, above all, traffic data generated by the movement patterns of mobile phones inside vehicles collected anonymously from the Vodafone Italy network. This is then combined with anonymous data from TomTom devices as well as other traditional sources of traffic information to provide the world’s most advanced traffic information service: TomTom HD Traffic. The traffic information is relayed in real time and securely to TomTom devices thanks to Vodafone Italy’s patented Machine to Machine (M2M) solutions and includes a SIM card with a GPRS connection that have been built into the navigation device. HD Traffic is already available in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Switzerland and France. It will be available in Belgium and Portugal later this year.

Ferruccio Borsani, head of Vodafone Italia’s Business Division: “As a leading telecommunications provider, we are always looking at new ways of using mobile technology to offer customers useful innovations that meet their everyday and working needs. Our partnership with TomTom is a perfect example of this. Thanks to this agreement we will be able to really help people better manage their time and their travel arrangements, easily and with the utmost reliability.”

“TomTom LIVE Services deliver information to motorists ‘over the air’. In addition to HD Traffic, TomTom LIVE services include safety alerts including real-time safety camera reporting and sharing, meaning users can keep each other informed about mobile safety cameras. It also covers up-to-date fuel price information guides users to the cheapest fuel stations along routes or in their area. Then it has online local search with Google turning search results into a destination at the press of a button, giving users access to millions of locations and delivering search results that are always up to date.” The company states.