Inrix, which develops software that predicts traffic patterns, today highlighted an independent research study by Frost & Sullivan that compared two of the top providers of real-time traffic information in the U.S.

The study involved an analysis of Inrix and Traffic.com. The report compared the two providers in the areas of accuracy and miles covered.

Inrix, spun out from Microsoft Research in April 2005, predicts traffic patterns minutes, days or even a year into the future and sends the information to the Web or to portable devices.

Traffic.com, based in Wayne, Pa., started in 1998 and operates locally based traffic centers around the country.

While both Inrix and Traffic.com provide strong and comparable levels of accuracy in reporting travel times, Inrix covered more roadways around the country, the study said.

"Inrix is uniquely aggregating real-time data from over 625,000 GPS-enabled commercial vehicles and combining it with data from multiple private and public sources," said Veerender Kaul, Frost & Sullivan's program manager.

As part of the study, Frost & Sullivan drove routes in three U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Providence, R.I. It then compared the actual travel times to the data from Inrix and Traffic.com.

Although the two companies use very different methodologies for collecting traffic data, the study found both showed a generally high accuracy of more than 70 percent. In evaluating nearly 150 trials over 15 routes in the three cities, the average measured route travel time was within one minute of the actual travel time.