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And DAB as discussed earlier. See ETSI TS 102 368. INRIX are still broadcasting their TMC service on FM, and claim to also have a UK DAB service since 2012. Although we have no confirmation that VAG products implement receiving via DAB.

I’d only received complaints from UK users. It seems inconceivable to me given the number of users for my custom RNSE firmware, especially in Germany, that TMC has also ceased working in the rest of Europe. INRIX, the alternative UK TMC service provider, are still alive and well and still broadcasting in the UK. It’s just that VAG vehicles aren’t programmed/licensed to receive it. Also TrafficMaster were a UK only company, so there’s no way withdrawal of their service in the UK could result in an impact in the rest of Europe. So a couple of possible explanations here… a) You weren’t receiving a strong enough FM signal to ensure the TMC was being received without error (RDS station names on the other hand are less fussy about errors) b) The navigation unit filters the available TMC services it receives by RDS country code to your current location Edit: c) Or as joek666 points out, perhaps you just weren’t receiving the correct stations

How do you know that it can’t? Not sure TrafficMaster ever broadcast on DAB. And VAG vehicles are only licenced to receive TMC from that one supplier. INRIX have been broadcasting TPEG on DAB since 2010. Supplied to Toyota and Garmin, at least in 2012 when the presentation was written.

No problem with that if FM broadcast was being discontinued at the same time. And TMC over DAB is perfectly possible ETSI TS 102 368. Of course you need a DAB equipped vehicle. I can’t help be feel a key issue here is the UK governments decision to go with a commercial TMC service. In quite a few other European countries TMC is run as a free to air government service. You’ll be in an even worse situation with internet connected devices. Manufacturers (in many different fields from automotive to home appliances such as smart TVs) are notorious for “obsoleting” those services after a few years. Usually using the same tired excuse that “technology has moved on” to force you into purchasing their latest device, usually with some requirement for a subscription service. There should be a regulatory requirement for manufacturers to display a minimum “support lifetime” on all products from date of sale, with ability to make a claim for a percentage of the purchase price if they don’t stick to that. At least then consumers will know where they stand, and we may even reduce some e-waste at the same time.

A few alternatives I can think of… 1. TrafficMaster decided to stop providing the service of their own accord (no longer profitable). Maybe they are unable to increase licence fees due to fixed price contracts having been negotiated years ago. 2. Another manufacturer (not VAG) decided to not renew their licence. TrafficMaster attempted to pass on costs to their remaining licensees, and VAG decided that was an unacceptable increase. On losing yet another customer TrafficMaster decided offering a service was unsustainable. 3. Similar to above, but it was VAG who decided not to renew first and it was other other manufacturers that then balked at the increased cost. 4. There isn’t an Ofcom tendering process that I can find for the service on Capital/Heart/Smooth. My assumption is they own their own Additional Services Licence. So perhaps Global Radio decided to increase their fee for carrying the service. Any combination of the above. But with this being commercially sensitive we’ll probably never know the real cause. For now I think all we can do is keep the pressure on VAG pointing out that TMC is still working for some other marques.

Already done that. Unfortunately their response is not very helpful. At least we have confirmation from two independent sources that their service has ceased and we can push back on VAG. The Ofcom response is particularly useful as it confirms the contractural relationship between service provider (TrafficMaster / Teltrac Navman) and vehicle manufacturers/mapping providers. So there must be someone in VAGs digital mapping team who is aware of this, or at very least of the implications.

Well they renewed their licence for another 9 years just last year, and the licence application fee alone was a non-refundable £20,000. And for their previous licence, which expired in 2022, they were apparently paying £200,000 pa. My assumption is their business position, at least for now, is a whole load more healthy that TrafficMasters appears to have been. And I found this reference which says at least VOLVO use them. And some TomTom products include their location tables which, going on raw binary size, is over 3 times as large as the TrafficMaster offering.

From INRIX’s own Ofcom ASL Application… https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/104743/application-inrix-uk.pdf Service Encryption The ISO standard (ISO14819) covering the definition of RDS-TMC, in part 6, allows for a service to be encrypted. Encryption is normally used to allow a service provider to use a publicly available location table and protect access to the data being provided through the use of a “service key.” The INRIX Service in not encrypted. It is sent technically as a “free-to air” service, instead the INRIX Service utilises a proprietary location table and thus encryption is not required. Devices that wish to receive the INRIX service must be integrated with the INRIX Location Table to be able to decode the Location codes, this table is provided to contracted OEMs and device makers to integrate into their receivers.

I did indeed tweak the firmware, but only because that was the quickest way for me to test INRIX without having to rewrite the map data. For VAG it’s just a matter of licencing with INRIX and including the tables and necessary configuration with a map update. No firmware changes should be required. Although when I say “just” I think there might be quite a bit of work mapping the location tables onto the map, and of course the expense of the contract with INRIX. And of course this doesn’t help if maps are no longer produced for legacy systems (such as Audi RNSE) as VAG are not going to roll a new map update for a discontinued platform.

At least for Audi and Seats RNSE system maps were produced by Here. https://www.here.com They were owned by Nokia at one point, but were bought by a consortium of the German auto makers (VAG , BMW and Benz). If you contact Here I expect them to at least know what you are talking about as they have developer documentation on their site about RMC. https://developer.here.com/documentation/traffic/dev_guide/topics/filtering-tmc-tables.html

@Hillbilly23 Unfortunately I don’t think it’s possible for INRIX to transmit TrafficMaster data. Firstly they don’t own or have access to the TrafficMaster location tables. Secondly a TMC service consumes virtually all of the spare RDS bandwidth, so transmitting duplicate data would degrade their own service, and third I don’t believe it’s even possible to broadcast multiple TMC tables on the same FM frequency. So in order to do that, while at the same time maintaining their own service on Classic, they’d need to use a different FM station, most logically Capital and/or Heart which have now been vacated by TrafficMaster. I don’t know how Trafficmaster licensed their service, and if there was a yearly fee charged of VAG. I imagine there would have been. So either the manufacturers (including VAG) need to stump up some more money and TrafficMaster might be persuaded to resume their service. Or, for systems still receiving map updates, the manufacturers need to contract with INRIX and to issue an update which includes the INRIX location tables.

Correct. I’m not sure what the deal is with Trafficmaster, but Ofcom do not appear to be responsible for auctioning their licence. Ofcoms only responsibility is for the national additional services licence on Classic. It seems likely that due to the way their networks came about, Capital and Heart probably own the rights to use their additional services bandwidth and it is therefore not subject to a competitive tender process. I draw this conclusion from the Ofcom documents, and the fact that even the last tender process (for the previous period in 2010) mentions only a SINGLE national additional services licence, and yet we know that TrafficMaster used to broadcast on Capital/Heart in conjunction with the service on Classic. Regrettably it seems to me this whole process is conceptually flawed. Since the location tables are owned and maintained by the service providers, it means that a change of licensee will result in a termination of service to existing devices, unless by chance they are still receiving an updates from the manufacturer, and the manufacturer chooses to contract with the new provider. Typical non-joined up government thinking if you ask me. To emphasise: that’s not what’s happened here, the termination of the TrafficMaster service on Capital/Heart seems to be down to other factors. But I’d be surprised if they weren’t also commercial in nature. Their 2021 accounts don’t look particularly healthy and note the directors comments… Edit: Adding link https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03666090

Unfortunately Audi stopped producing maps for the RNSE in 2020. So it’s not going to receive an update. But it doesn’t even need a firmware update, a change of provider can all be done in the maps data. It was just easier for me to tweak the firmware to make the received INRIX data look like it had come from Trafficmaster, than to reverse engineer and modify the map data. And I before you ask I don’t have a copy of the proprietary INRIX location tables.

I’m as sure as I can be from looking at the Audi RNSE firmware (which has also suffered loss of its TMC service) that TMC elsewhere in Europe is completely unaffected. I have a lot of customers based there using my updated RNSE firmware and not a single one (other than those in the UK) are reporting loss of service. In fact I even switched the firmware to listen to INRIX, and the missing TMC messages have reappeared. However the indicated locations are complete and utter garbage since the location tables used by Trafficmaster are completely different from INRIX as they are competing commercial suppliers.

Excellent mail, but the problems not with INRIX. There are (or were up until a month or so ago) 2 separate and competing TMC service providers in the UK. Trafficmaster, who broadcast on Capital, Heart etc, and INRIX who broadcast on Classic FM. INRIX is indeed continuing to broadcast and functions perfectly normally for receivers that have a licence to use their service. Unfortunately it seems most (maybe all) VAG systems are licenced only to use Trafficmaster broadcasts. Trafficmaster appear to have decided that they no longer wish to provide a service on FM.

Okay, from here… https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102600_102699/102668/01.01.01_60/ts_102668v010101p.pdf SID = Service IDentifier (TMC)

Thanks for that. I suppose certainly worth looking at the MIB2 maps a seeing if the location table is extractable. For your unit looks like the SID (whatever that is) is incorrect. XML says 55 and GEM shows 10. Looks like SID is same as LTN, so I suppose it could be a mistake on the GEM display? But then also there’s the “sup” column. Supported perhaps? Maybe not supported because the SID is wrong?

The problem with switching to INRIX is that the location tables (which specify through a 16 bit code precisely where on the road network an incident is located) are proprietary to each service provider. Trafficmaster on Capital/Heart uses (or used to use) location table 0x07 and INRIX on Classic uses 0x0A. So unless I am mistaken (and both UK providers somehow used the same location identifiers, but gave their services different table identifiers) this makes the map data (which contains the mapping of location IDs to actual physical locations) totally incompatible. In fact it’s intentionally designed that way to prevent you switching providers without paying for the location table mappings of the new provider. Therefore a map update is almost certainly required to switch providers, since original maps would have only included the location table for the provider originally contracted with at the time of production (ie. Trafficmaster 0x07). I’ve debugged the data being received on another VAG platform (Audi’s RNSE system) and can confirm that although the TMC identifier for table 0x07 is still being transmitted on Capital and Heart, there are no actual TMC messages present. Classic on the other hand still has its 0x0A identifier AND has actual messages being broadcast. I’m going to attempt a switch in the RNSE firmware to listen to the alternate table ID, but I’m 99.99% sure that the location IDs will be different and so this will ultimately prove fruitless (or at the very least result in totally garbled meaningless locations).

Similar problem with Audi vehicles using RNSE head unit here. The RNSE uses RDS TMC data with location table 0x07, which is broadcast on Capital and Heart here in London. Presume that’s the Trafficmaster system, as the other UK provider is ITIS on Classic (see https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190078/Traffic_and_Travel_Report_1_.pdf). Having debugged the data being received by the RNSE I can see only the packet which identifies the location table 0x07 is being broadcast. Absolute no actual TMC messages. In contrast I can see the ITIS service on Classic is transmitting both location table 0x0A and copious amounts of actual TMC messages. Unfortunately having different location tables means the two services are incompatible, since the Audi navigation database (based on Here maps) contains only location table 0x07 data for identifying incident locations. Currently looking for some way to contact Trafficmaster.