MSN Direct and Traffic Alerts

MSN Direct includes traffic alerts with your subscription.

If you mean MSN Direct and FM Traffic, the answer is no. The MSN or FM Traffic receiver is contained in the charging cable.

Also, to obtain the other service. you need to purchase a receiver and a subscription . For example, our 680 came with a GDB 50 receiver for MSN Direct. If we wanted to use FM traffic, we'd have to buy a GTM 20 receiver and a subscription to TMC Traffic.

Both the MSN Direct and FM Traffic services provide traffic alerts (accidents, incidents, road closures, delays. MSN also provides weather, gas prices, movie times, etc.

The traffic receivers are in the charging cable, and the gpsr will only allow one to be plugged in at a time.

You may though switch between the cables at different times if you wish. Some cities you will find have one service and not the other.

Daniel

Thanks for your feedback. You can use only service at a time because they both user different receivers. I hope MSN Direct receivers are available in Canadain chain stores?

I'm not sure if they will be in Future Shop or Canadian Tire.

If you can't find them locally, you can order them from Gpscity.ca

You can check coverage at http://www.msndirect.com/coverage.aspx (remembering that the coverage they show is pretty optimistic).

Remember too that traffic information on MSN Direct is available in just a handful of large Canadian cities. Toronto is the only area that has some semblance of flow information. Check coverage at http://www.msndirect.com/data-availability.aspx

I have the MSN receiver and the one year free subscription but I likely will not renew it because there is no traffic coverage in Edmonton AB, and only some of the other features work very well.
if their was a discounted price for it I might consider it because it would be nice when travelling.

It seems that any GPS traffic in Canada is limited to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver.

It would be nice if some company would increase the coverage to at least the top 15 or so metropolitan areas listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropo...

It doesn't seem to be worth the cost to any company to do so.

Radioworld (http://radioworld.ca/) at Jane and Steeles carry them.

Just wanted to chime in with my experience with MSN traffic service here in the Vancouver, B.C. area. In a word it's useless. I've had the service activated now for nine days and the screen has only shown two changes in that time. It has displayed the same two road construction locations the past five days; there hasn't been any traffic accident reports, road closure reports, etc. shown over this nine day period. I know that the receiver is working because weather, gas prices, and movie times info have all been received and updated. It is disappointing since MSN's website shows that traffic(incidents) info should be available here. I've read elsewhere that Montreal users have also experienced sporadic to nonexistent MSN traffic service as well. IMO I believe that the infrastructure for this service to work consistently is not "ready for prime time" in my area. Traffic.com advised me to contact MSN about this issue and it was elevated to a supervisory level there. I was told that a supervisor would call me back in 72 hours, that was last Wednesday....no call yet. We'll see what happens when I contact them on Monday but for now I'm just glad I have FM traffic service on my old 660.

Peter, nuvi 660 and 680

Hi Peter,
I just purchased a MSN cable for my Garmin 755T gps. The only incident I have seen so far is the one on Marine dr. (east and west). Is this all you are getting? On the MSN web page it states that traffic incidents are available for the Vancouver area, so I would think that there would be more than just that one incident, over a 3 day period. Did you get an answer from MSN about this issue?

Thanks ,

Corrado

Hi Peter and Corrado,

I have the same problem for more than 4 months and.
I called Garmin and MSN more than ten times no one solved the problem.

I would suggest you to report this matter on Feedback of msndirect web site as well. That is what their CSR recommended when we had outage in Toronto about month ago.

i'm getting a new nuvi 1350T with free lifetime traffic services i believed. if i wanted to subscribe to msn traffic alert does it worth it? i enjoyed using the traffic services of my old garmin C550, and looking for an upgrade for this services.