mikealder
Pocket GPS Moderator
Joined: Jan 14, 2005
Posts: 19638
Location: Blackpool , Lancs
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 Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 5:26 pm Post subject: |
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Only TomTom could answer this one, but I doubt the price will change much to be honest, it is advertised as a premium service.
With a subscribed GPRS connection you get full country wide coverage from the traffic information, with the RDS-TMC you only get regional coverage, that said the area covered is quite vast and even at motorway speeds would take over 3 hours to cover the limits by which time the receiver will have updated you with more regional specific information.
The issue of reception using RDS for data is still an issue in parts of the country, but the new receiver is much better than previous versions, where GPRS scores better is the long range information, for example if I were to leave Blackpool heading for Ashford in Kent and there was a major hold up near the end of the M6 I would be near Birmingham before I was notified, with GPRS the notification would be instant and on leaving Blackpool I could elect to go M62/M1 due to the better coverage. It would have to be a very bad incident needing 2 plus hous to clear up and reopen the road but this sort of thing happens sadly on the UK motorway network all too often.
There are other issues where the RDS data is more accurate than the GPRS specifically the delay tme offered by the device, the company that supply traffic related information to TomTom do not put delays out above a certain threshold, so when you see a delay of 300 minutes when using GPRS where does it come from, probably the TomTom server.
The whole Traffic information system is still in its early days, hopefully it will improve but for now I will still use the radio and motorway gantry signs to make an educated guess as to the true situation before making a route change, I certainly don't let the device re-route automatically - Mike |
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