Thread: Using TMC in Garmin nuvi for free

NAVTEQ is a global company specializing in maps and related services, but with strong competitors in specific areas in many countries, such as Traffic, for example, locales where it is far from the best. In various of these regions she sub hires local companies to provide traffic information that go feed their databases. But one of the biggest limitations is in the TMC (Traffic Messenger Channel) that use FM radio analogic transmission for traffic data, system used by Garmin and that do not have much to do with the amount of traffic data available on Navteq and other providers. Besides the limitation on comprehensiveness, capacity and speed in baud rate and data updates also have the question of the codes traffic compatible built-in in the map, which further limits comprehensiveness of the system, since the Navteq is not anything agile to update maps, especially in countries on the periphery of your market, as in Brazil.

To try to overcome these limitations Garmin launched in the United States the HD Traffic system that uses digital radio transmission and considerably surpassed the previous system, but still falls far short of the transmission capacity and updates from data transmitted over broadband Internet. The only advantage these radio diffusion data system is not have cost to use. To overcome such drawbacks Garmin offers services as Traffic by Smart Link, application of recent models of GPS that has bluetooth and allow the online connection data between the phone and gps, but is not a service available in South America, in addition to being paid and also depend of the cellular and broadband internet.