TomTom to track phones for real-time traffic info: "The system uses standard signalling data sent back and forth between mobile phones and cellular base-stations to pin-point a handset's location and speed, which are effectively the position and speed of the vehicle it's inside. Build a composite of all the data received this way from handsets located along a road and you have an indication of how congested - or not - that road is."

Interesting; I'd heard of this technique before, perhaps it was their trial...?

Comments

[simon cavill]

Tom,
This has been around for almost as long as the mobile phone itself. You simply make a note of the base stations along a major route such as a motorway and then take a statistical sample of MSISDN's noting the time they take to move from one base station to the next. Its relatively easy to then work out how fast the phones/cars are moving.

Simon

[M]

You make it sound super easy, Simon, but to a lot of us its a little more challenging. Never heard of this one before, either, until this post.

Marc