Traffic and Travel Information (TTI) Broadcasting
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Traffic and Travel Information (TTI) broadcasting Traffic and Travel Information broadcasting history Broadcasters recognized the need to help drivers, with easy to understand information, many years ago! EBU member organizations - the national broadcasters with country-wide coverage -have a long successful history of public service TTI broadcasting, delivered free to the end user. For many years they have cooperated to develop this important area of broadcasting through the ongoing EBU Broadcasts for Motorists activity and through the Eurotravel conferences, usually held every four years. The range of TTI broadcasting is considerable and includes many thousands of spoken TTI announcements across Europe every day, supported by TV and Teletext information and service phones. Recently this has been augmented by newly developed services using the Internet and emerging RDS-TMC services. Within the EBU framework, this significant broadcasting sector is supported operationally by daily contacts between EBU members across national boarders, to provide strategic knowledge covering TTI situations in other countries. TTI coming up-to-date In the last ten to 12 years, massive amounts of research and development have been funded by the European Commission (EC), within the very wide Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) budgets, to bring forward many technical solutions for TTI collection (eg road sensors), information interchange (eg DATEX) and dissemination (eg RDS-TMC). However, in the last five years, significant commercial exploitation, using non TTI has a long successful broadcasting delivery (eg GSM phones) has been developed to the extent that TTI - history - before RDS-TMC broadcasting and narrowcasting - now has many new opportunities and threats to consider. New technologies for TTI European perspective for TTI funded by Europe within ITS budgets These developments have led the European Union (EU) to declare its policy for RDS-TMC, as the first priority action for deployment Europe-wide in the next few years (Community Strategy and Framework for the Deployment of Road Transport RDS-TMC is high Telematics in Europe, COM(97)223 final). Over the last two and a half years, the EBU implementation priority for has been working in the EC funded EPISODE Project, which is concerned with Europe monitoring the RDS-TMC final implementation plans. It is providing a “voice” for the broadcast sector in the TTI and Transport worlds, which are dominated by ministries and very large industrial companies who use their lobbying power, Commercial interest in TTI through ERTICO, to influence EC policy-making, and ultimately this reaches the may not be public service European parliament decision-makers. oriented TTI issues are not all straight forward! Public broadcasters RDS-TMC The EU priority action to deploy RDS-TMC was considered to become an EU services poorly coordinated Directive. This would have imposed the need for broadcasters to implement RDS- TMC, without any possibility of escape! Nevertheless the outcome was a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for RDS-TMC services with so-called, ALERT functionality. It appears that this MoU hides the use of the ALERT-Plus protocol for Status oriented messages, as well as the ALERT-C protocol for RDS-TMC Event oriented services (see article 13). Implementation of ALERT-Plus will not be acceptable to public service broadcasters, who cannot release the very large RDS data capacity required for ALERT-Plus. The commercial sector has continued to attempt to push a point of view, which hardly recognizes the public service elements of TTI and, as a result, the EU objective of European-wide deployment of RDS-TMC is considerably delayed. The EPISODE Project The EPISODE Project, being a inter-disciplinary group, where journalists, programme editors and engineers have worked closely together, has been able to monitor both editorial, end-user and technical issues. As a result, it has issued a number of Project Statements which are on the EPISODE Project web site at URL: www.rds.org.uk/ episode. These Statements were not always welcomed at the time of issue, but later the non-broadcast sectors involed in RDS-TMC implementation have come to realise that the concepts and predictions therein were indeed realistic and valid. Additionally, the EPISODE Project developed the text of an EBU Statement D81-1996 on RDS-TMC, which suggests a positioning in favour of RDS-TMC implementation, but also looks towards the future of DAB. RDS-TMC implementation steps Across Europe, many EC-funded Projects are now beginning to set up RDS-TMC deployments, but these are being driven by ministry and government agencies. The Euro-Regional Projects, in particular, are aiming at solving cross border issues. From the broadcasting viewpoint these are not fully coordinated and different models are being used, including some in which the network-capable public service broadcasters are not included. In this context the power of the European member states’ transport A fifth of driving time ministries to decide on their policies (even potentially to the disadvantage of the is spent getting lost on broadcasters traditional sources of information) must not be underestimated. unfamiliar roads and motorists waste The European trend for separating broadcasters and transmission operators has been a 350,000 tonnes cause for concern within the EBU, because the TTI world does not understand the of fuel going around resulting difficulty that broadcasters face in coordinating on-air information via the in circles - The various delivery mechanisms in use: Spoken radio announcements, Internet, TV, Automobile Association, Teletext, and RDS-TMC. UK European statistics suggest that some 680 million road journeys are made each weekday, lasting an average of 20 minutes. If 10% of the traffic is held up in traffic jams, that represents a total cost of ECU 32 billion per year, not counting heavy-goods traffic! The cost in time lost, owing to traffic problems, is estimated at 0.5% of the European GDP. Public service TTI broadcasting, helping to alleviate these problems, is a far from negligible contribution to the economies of the EU Member States. 1 TTI in the new competitive environment The upcoming new scenario for TTI service provision Future TTI services will have to be developed on the assumption that mobile communication with people on the road will definitely take place within a new competitive multimedia service environment where broadcast technology will be just one delivery mechanism and another will be mobile telephone technology. In this particular context, we can note the following trend: traffic information receivers were in the past essentially car radios for which there was a significant after-market, supported by more than 50 different consumer electronic manufacturers, mainly from Europe and Far East, supplying a wide range of products. Since RDS has been on the market, car manufacturers have tended, more and more, to integrate the car radio in conjunction with multi-functional displays in the dashboard, and these will be increasingly used together with other telematics functionality. Additionally they order OEM equipment, meeting their own interface requirements, which somewhat opposes any standardization of these interfaces. Most recently, the German mobile telephone provider Mannesmann-Autocom New multimedia technology acquired VDO, a large company that manufactures vehicle instruments and car is developed for GSM dashboards and then, Philips Car Systems, one of the major car radio manufacturers that is also an important supplier of telematic terminals and navigational systems. All this indicates that the after-market for these products may Trend to integrate gradually shrink and that a number of different telematic systems, as accepted by telematics functionality the market, will coexist through telematics equipment that is delivered with the car into the car radio to the end-user. The possibility to use GSM for Different telematics systems cell data broadcasting will coexist Studies on the use of the GSM mobile telephone system for the provision of two- way communication between information centres and computers on-board Multi-functionality introduced equipped vehicles started in the European Commissions’s DRIVE I (1989-1991) by first installed car radio project SOCRATES (System of Cellular Radio for Traffic Efficiency and Safety). equipment GSM includes the possibility for data communication such as the SMS (Short Message Services) channel that can be used for traffic message services, point-to- TTI is also identified by GSM point and point-to-multipoint (cell broadcast), route guidance and emergency calls. operators as a killer GSM also provides a full data call functionality that permits implementation of pre- application and on-trip travel planning and also dynamic route guidance in a navigational system. The widely spread GSM technology is thus, in addition to traditional broadcasting, very suitable for the provision of a large variety of data services of Navigational systems shall interest to mobile road-users, either using the bi-directional communication link or offer Dynamic Route the inherent data cell broadcasting feature. Guidance Integration of Internet and GSM technology has been studied extensively in the EC funded PROMISE project. This project aims at the development of a traffic and travel information service employing a new type of user terminal, the Nokia 9000 Communicator, using the data communication capabilities of the