TomTom Traffic in France

[Golfer]

I have just last night setup the TomTom Plus trial 30 day evaluation which includes TT Traffic.

I am hoping to use it later this week when I start my holiday in France. I am using an ipaq 5550 where I have an existing partnership setup using my Vodaphone connection.

Can anyone tell me what I would need to setup to use TomTom Traffic in France? Should I setup a new Vodaphone coonection with a national French Vodaphone number to avoid calling England from France, and if so, does anyone know the number and settings ?!?!?!

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[etters]

Hi there
although I do not have tom tom I do have tmc. I find while driving through France that it is much easyer to tune your car radio into the trafic info which is displayed on the side of all motorways in France.I think that the usual freq is 107.7 but unless you can speak French it's next to useles as they sometimes do not have English for info, hope this helps
regards Geoff
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Takara GP56 igo primo 1.1
Dont rely on them use your brain as well

[paulbo]

Golfer - not sure if you can change your GPRS settings, but I suspect it's not worth it. I regularly drive from the UK (west London) to Holland (Breda) and use traffic with ten-minute update intervals. On my last round trip (some 600 miles) this cost me less than £1.40.

[iancjc]

unfortunately I don't beleive that you traffic service will operate in france as it is country specific. your free trial will be for the uk.

You have to have a seperate traffic account for each country

On the plus side I've just driven 2000 miles in france over the past month and didn't suffer one major holdup. the first part of the journey was 140 miles to portsmouth which took 5 hours on a wednesday night and then the following morning I drove 550 miles in approx 8 hours in France.

France is a great place to travel by car (or train).
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TyTn II (WM6.1) / tomtom one v2
TTN6.03 tomtom 7.xx (one)

[paulbo]

I can confirm that I successfully used the free traffic trial in TTN 5.0 in France, Belgium and Holland: it works okay. I subsequently paid for the full European service, which also works (most of the time, but not, irritatingly, this morning).

[iancjc]

hadn't realised the european service was available - it wasn't when I subscribed!

Ian
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TyTn II (WM6.1) / tomtom one v2
TTN6.03 tomtom 7.xx (one)

[paulbo]

It was staggeringly unhelpful earlier this week, forecasting an hour delay due to a road closure on the N1 (France) - A18 (Belgium) road.

True, there was a road closure (as there has been for some months now) due to bridge repairs. Total delay was about 30 seconds, as traffic swung across onto the other carriageway for a hundred yards or so, and didn't go below 50mph.

The problem is, had I not known about the bridge work, I may have re-routed around this, and added upto an hour to my journey just by doing so - all in order to avoid an imaginary delay. Now, that's annoying.

[CalumLawson]

Out of interest, what tariff/service provider is everyone using? I have a Vodafone contract and the charges would be £10.50 per MB whilst abroad with a minimum charge of 200KB per session (compared with £2.35 per MB and no minimum charge in the UK)

I worked out that each session (ie Starting TomTom to stopping TomTom, or when the network dropped connection) would work out at about £2.10 per session as most TomTom traffic updates are quite small and fit within the 200KB. I expected that there would be a few pockets where phone reception wasn't possible, times where I'd stop and switch off the PDA which would all result in a new data session, I could easily see that my data costs could easily rack up for not much data being downloaded.

I therefore disabled my trial of traffic prior to crossing the channel as I didn't think that it was worth that.

Was this the experience of anyone else who made use of traffic in France and is anyone using a better tariff/service provider than this?

Thanks

Calum

[paulbo]

Hi - I use Orange on a Pay-as-you-go SIM, and I've been using Traffic since TTN5 was release. In that time, I've done some 9500 miles, using TTN and Traffic, of which, about half of those miles have been in France/Belgium/Holland. I guess I use TTN and Traffic for 95% of my journeys (even just for the traffic information alone, it's useful when travelling on the M1 to work each day).

Session stability is usually quite good. Obviously, roaming from one country to another causes a drop in the GPRS and a redial - not always successful on the first attempt. I check trafic every ten minutes, and the only real problems are after crossing a border.

In that time, I've topped up a total of £50, and I've used about £30 of that - very roughly, that's about 3p per mile. I have no idea on the published price for GPRS usage abroad with orange. I just use it until t runs out, then top it up again. I also use GPRS now and again for other stuff - surfing, mail, etc., but that's quite unusual - I can usually find wireless somewhere or other for free.

Hope that helps. Sorry it's not very scientific. I'm back in Holland in a few weeks, and I'll try and do something more useful (ie: log costs/miles/location) across the trip.

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