GPS devices are great for navigating your way around unfamiliar places, and even try to route you around traffic hotspots. However, they’ve been notoriously unreliable at spotting traffic jams, as they either discover them too late (i.e. when the traffic around you has just stopped), or still think there’s a jam even when it cleared hours ago.

Now, though, Tom Tom has a new solution that combines its legendary Sat-Nav technology with Vodafone’s mobile phone network to identify traffic jams as they happen, and give you real time information on the length of the jam, the time you’ll be sat in it if you hit it, and how far away you are from it.

More details after the jump.

Existing traffic jam services work either by a series of cameras dotted around the country keeping tabs on the traffic flow (such as the TrafficMaster system, which uses 7,500 cameras and sensors around the UK), or by monitoring the movement of GPS-tracked vehicles, such as AA vans and National Express coaches.

Although these services work, they’re not fool-proof, as the sensor network only covers part of a country, while the vehicle-monitoring service only gives a snap-shot of the area immediately surrounding the vehicles fitted with the devices. Obviously this area tends to be the main motorways and trunk roads, so again, coverage is limited.

In contrast, Tom Tom’s new service, called High Definition (HD) Traffic, works by monitoring the mobile phones connected to Vodafone’s mobile phone network. Not any specific mobile phone – the service doesn’t track individual users – but tens of thousands, building up a profile of how fast they’re moving, where they’re moving, and whether they suddenly seem to be slowing down.

Effectively, anyone with a Vodafone mobile phone that’s switched on becomes an information provider. The phone’s location is identified by its connection to its nearest basestation, and irrelevant mobile phone signals, such as those from pedestrians or cyclists, are filtered out by sophisticated algorithms that are able to recongise movement patterns, and so focus only on the movements of vehicles.

The service can therefore build up a picture of traffic movement across an entire country, and this can be relayed back to individual Tom Tom units via the mobile phone network. The Tom Tom GPS device is therefore updated far more frequently than current devices, providing a comprehensive country-wide service that’s updated in near real-time.

According to the Sunday Times, the service works flawlessly. Its reporter, Simon Kurs, used the service in Tom’s Tom’s native Holland, and was warned of an impending traffic jam up ahead. “Before me the unit displayed the distance to a traffic jam, the time it would take to reach it, and how long the delay would last,” he wrote. “We were told it would be two minutes to reach the jam, and that we would be delayed by four minutes; it was right about both.”

This is a fantastic new innovation, and should be a genuine benefit to the millions of commuters who dread the daily grind to work. Traffic jams are bad enough on their own, but the thing that really makes them bad is the feeling of the sudden loss of control. You’ve no idea how long you’re going to be sat in one for, when and where it ends, and whether you should turn off at the nearest junction (and possibly add 10 miles to your route), or whether it’s better to ride it out.

With Tom Tom and Vodafone’s new service, you have all that data at your fingertips, so even if the Sat-Nav device can’t find a better route around the jam, at least you’ll know how long you’ll be waiting for.

It’s also an innovative use of the mobile phone network, and shows the power of convergence of these two mighty 21st century devices. Just as mobile phones are becoming fully-fledged GPS devices in their own right, while GPS devices add SIM cards and Bluetooth, now we have Sat-Nav and mobile networks converging to offer us navigational solutions previously undreamed of.

[Source: Sunday Times]