How it Works

eNowNow's traffic system uses a wide range of the latest in internet and mobile technologies to ensure that you always know the traffic situation before you leave your home or office.

How do we collect our traffic information?

At present we collect our traffic information using a team of mobile traffic monitors who each follow a series of pre-determined routes around the megacity of Lagos. At a number of pre-selected points along these routes our monitors stop and take a photograph of the current traffic conditions which is then sent via an MMS message to our servers.

Once the message reaches our servers it is automatically matched to the geographical location that it was taken from, decoded and the traffic conditions analysed. This analysed information and the image is then inserted into our traffic conditions database which is used to display our Live traffic map.

Based on our testing and the routes we have designed for our traffic monitors to follow, a specific location on our map should receive an update approximately every 15 minutes.

How do SMS / Email updates work?
Every 15 minutes our servers check our database for subscribers that have requested an email or SMS update from us at that specific time. For each user our server then looks up the current traffic conditions in our live traffic database for the locations a subscriber has asked for.

This information is then formatted to fit into a 160 character text or be displayed in an email and sent through our own email and SMS servers.

Why don't I always receive my SMS update at the exact time I requested?

In order to allow for large volumes of messages at peak times we may begin sending our updates up to 7 minutes before the scheduled time and not finish until 7 minutes afterwards. Additionally as we all know from using them everyday the networks can also frequently experience delays in the receipt, forwarding and sending of SMS messages. We try our best to get the message to you when you ask, and every message is time-stamped with the time at which it was sent so you can see if it was our error or an issue with the network.

Why is my SMS alert in txt spk?
An SMS is limited to just 160 characters, so in order for us to be able to fit everything into a single message we've had to compress it slightly. The only way to do this effectively is to shorten words into so called text speak.