By: Dan Nesfeder
If you manage a fleet of drivers, you know that mobile data bills are a cost of doing business. As of today, we’ve added options to the Mapbox Navigation SDK to help you manage those bills by consuming as little mobile bandwidth as possible. In addition, the system can seamlessly fall back to offline routing in case of low connectivity.
By pre-loading map and routing tiles and using an onboard voice engine, your navigation app will use very little mobile data. The data it does use will be of the highest value to your drivers: real-time, traffic-powered ETAs and feedback. In addition, the system is designed flexibly enough to request new data in case a driver ventures outside of their typical service area.
With this configuration, your users get the best of all worlds: low bandwidth and offline support, as well as traffic-aware directions and the ability to submit feedback to Mapbox.
How does low-bandwidth routing work?
Low-bandwidth routing makes changes to the three primary services used by mobile navigation: maps, routing, and voice.
Maps
Map tiles are primarily offline, with the ability to request additional map tiles dynamically. The SDK will request the new tiles as needed, and add them to the device’s cache. With a sufficient bounding box, online tiles are never needed; but drivers are covered in case they leave their usual service area. Here’s a visualization:
Routing
Routing remains primarily online. The bandwidth required by a Directions API request is quite small (typically 1% of a fully online experience). Therefore, your users can still take advantage of traffic-aware ETAs and routing even while saving bandwidth elsewhere.
In case a driver has a bad mobile signal, you can side-load routing tiles onto the device. If the device is set up for offline routing, the SDK automatically detects whether to make a request via the network or offline. If the connection type is LTE, the device will use online directions; if 2G EDGE, the device will use offline directions.
Voice
Online voice instructions are a significant user of bandwidth, usually around 80–90%. The SDK can fall back to the onboard text-to-speech engine, which dramatically cuts online bandwidth usage.
Interested in cutting the mobile data bill for your fleet? Contact our team to learn more and get started.
Cut fleet data bills with hybrid online/offline routing was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.