So last week I ordered a Garmin model 265WT from Tigerdirect.ca (170$). The “T” at the end of the model number indicates that the FM RDS-TMC is included in the box. With such package, traffic information seems to be included for free for the whole life of the device. I’m not quite clear about that but for some reasons, Garmin also sells lifetime traffic information for 50$ on their website. Maybe some devices have to be activated before traffic information works?

Anyways. I received the device yesterday and was eager to try it. That’s what I did on my way home last night. It was very simple to install. In fact, nothing special has to be done. The lighter power cord must be plugged into the device and the car (the FM RDS receiver is part of that cord) and that’s it. When I launched the device, it took just a few seconds before I could see a little “traffic icon” on the maps.

Pressing on that icon revealed two types of traffic information. I took a picture (shown below) of the traffic situation last night at around 7pm in Ottawa. As we can see, there was heavy traffic on the main highway in Ottawa… and that was no surprise to me… it was perfect timing for my experiment: hockey night! And every time its the same thing: the highway gets jammed at the “Scotiabank Place”. So that’s the red segment on the map here.

The other traffic display shows a list of the various problem zones. This is shown on the second photo I took:

So very positive experience for me. I’m impressed. It works well and is very easy to use. The next step will be to see how real-time navigation and re-routing works considering the traffic. In the meantime, I guess canadians will want a new Garmin for Christmas because they certainly understand that traffic is a major enhancement on a GPS device.

If you wonder where exactly the service is available, have a look at this page on the Navteq website. A quick scan over the list shows following regions: Hamilton-Burlington, Montreal-Laval, Oshawa-Whitby-Clarington, Ottawa-Gatineau, St. Catharines-Niagara Falls-Welland, Toronto-Mississauga and Vancouver-Surrey-Burnaby.

! UPDATE, WARNING: I was told that the service has not been officially launched yet. I guess that this means it may be unstable or could even be stopped anytime. Please consider this if you think of buying yourself a new Garmin for Christmas.

My talk was titled: “Mobile Digital Broadcasting: An Infrastructure for One-to-Many Converged Services”. We took this opportunity to officially release our Openmokast open source software framework. I was happy that my live demo worked as expected!

We had prepared a clip just in case the “demo effect” would hit on me on stage. Luckily this was not the case but the clip (which is more detailed than the live demo) can still be seen on our crcmmb Youtube Channel or here below:

And here are the slides I used for this presentation:

eComm was also for me a great occasion to meet with David Burges who presented his OpenBTS project live using the USRP as well. His demo looked incredibly like mine except he demonstrated live cell phone communications going through his GSM open source base station. There are lots of commonalities between our projects but essentially, both are about democratizing communications technologies to catalyze innovation.