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 gives the most accurate and up-to-date traffic information in the world. It is part of TomTom’s LIVE Services that deliver essential information services to motorists helping them save time, money and fuel. The services are expected to be available in Italy from mid 2010.

TomTom LIVE Services deliver information to motorists ‘over the air’. In addition to HD Traffic, TomTom LIVE services include:

• TomTom Safety Alerts including real-time safety camera reporting and sharing, meaning users can keep each other informed about mobile safety cameras.
• TomTom Fuel Prices: up-to-date fuel price information guides users to the cheapest fuel stations along routes or in their area.
• 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.
• TomTom Weather gives local daily and five-day forecasts.

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 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.

“HD Traffic and TomTom LIVE Services have been embraced by drivers because having access to the most relevant and accurate journey information puts them in control of their day,” said Harold Goddijn, TomTom CEO. “We look forward to bringing TomTom LIVE Services to Italian drivers and help them to make intelligent decisions that save time and money.”

The TomTom HD Traffic service offers customers the most accurate delay and arrival times available with measurements of the delays in minutes and kilometres. These will then be regularly updated every three minutes as traffic conditions change. In addition, thanks to the TomTom HD Traffic service’s widespread coverage of the Italian road network, the best alternative route can always be calculated if needed.