NAVTEQ continues to work across all companies and industries. There is no change to the fact that NAVTEQ operates as a completely independent unit of Nokia. All customers continue to have access to all data under consistent terms and conditions. Unfortunately, we were unable to reach agreement to extend our contract with Nav4All in alignment with these terms and conditions. Our priority is to operate a manner that is fair to all our customers. We are pleased that Nokia recognizes that one condition of this is for NAVTEQ to remain independent. From a NAVTEQ perspective, providing equitable terms and conditions is another.

We've been dealing with Nokia (you can call them Navteq if you want, but it's clear who is calling the shots) for a while, and this comes as no surprise. Over the last two years the license fees have increased dramatically, and a heap of new conditions on the use of the data have been applied.

For example, we are not allowed to aggregate the Navteq data with data from any other provider. The result (and from Nokia's view, the objective) being that we can never provide better coverage or results than Nokia can. If we want to use Nokia's data, we can only use their data.

Unfortunately, we don't have any other option.

Because of the differences in formats etc, it'd cost at least a couple of man-years (design/buid/test) to re-tool things to use TeleAtlas. Plus, there's nothing stopping TomTom pulling the same tricks, in which case we're back to square one but a chunk of change down.

OSM isn't an option because of the poor covereage, lack of consistancy (dealing with all 438 different ways of describing a one-way street burns a *lot* of developer time), and licensing issues (using OSM with the current license in a closed source app is playing with fire, legal-wise).

There's a few other small country-specific providers, but you run into the same problems as OSM - dealing with tons of ways of expressing the same thing, poorly mapped areas or areas simply not mapped at all, and licensing/cost issues.

Fortunately, Nokia hasn't decided that they want to expand into our market yet, so they're happy to take our money and let us survive. But if they change their minds, we'd have to do the same as Nav4all and just walk away when our license gets pulled.

There's an alternative - open street map.
I've just driven to work using routing on a Garmin i3 with a map set for the whole of the uk - and it was perfect. And if I found a deficiency, it could be fixed by tomorrow. The future is here!