Traffic Information maintains its position as the most important feature of navigation services with the global number of traffic information users expected to grow from 57 million in 2010 to more than 370 million in 2015, according to the latest market data from ABI Research.

Telematics and Navigation practice director Dominique Bonte comments: "Navigation users continue to appreciate the value of traffic information allowing calculation of the fastest routes and accurate Estimated Times of Arrival (ETA) predictions. The emergence of historic speed profiles and predictive traffic information has extended the use case to trip planning."

The surge in handset navigation (increasingly available for free) is resulting in GPS probe data becoming more widely available, improving quality as well as spatial and temporal granularity.

That boosts adoption of high speed cellular connectivity technologies, replacing broadcast technologies such as RDS-TMC and satellite. While TomTom, IntelliOne, AirSage, and Cellint use cellular probe data as the main source for their traffic solutions, the lack of accuracy continues to be a major issue. Likewise, the importance of fixed road sensors is decreasing, reduced to key junctions and highways.

Major navigation brands such as Nokia (NAVTEQ) and Google leverage probe data from their customer bases to offer traffic information as part of their free navigation services. Smaller navigation vendors are shifting to lifetime traffic offers bundled with the navigation device or software.

This puts pressure on independent traffic information vendors such as INRIX, TrafficCast, and ITIS to lower their prices and increase data quality. For these players the high margin automotive and government segments will become key markets, compensating declining revenues in the competitive mobile and consumer electronics markets.

At the low end of the traffic ecosystem, pure crowd sourcing startups such as Waze and Aha Mobile have entered the market with traffic information based on passive and/or active community feedback.