Which is more amazing, ETC or IRD?Interesting question. What you'd think would be the obvious answer is ETC. Quarterhill paid much more for it than it paid for IRD. Plus, ETC is landing all these fantastic tolling contracts. And their technology looks awesomely amazing.
So here's my pitch for IRD. If you look at Kapsch and Q-Free (I'm pretty sure about this) they started out as more or less pure tolling stories. As they got bigger they both made an effort to get into non-tolling ITS. Things like weigh-in-motion. I'm not sure if this included tech for commercial vehicle enforcement, etc.
From their financial results it looks like this non-tolling expansion for both Kapsch and Q-Free has never really worked in terms of achieving profitability.
To put it another way, Kapsch and Q-Free traditionally were in ETC's business and they've done okay (especially Kapsch if you look back a few years) and then they expanded into something more like IRD's business and it has since been a disaster.
My point? The experiences of Kapsch and Q-Free suggest that the NON-tolling ITS business may actually be the tougher business. (But don't quote me on this.)
Yesterday someone suggested to me that Quarterhill might someday sell IRD. My response was like "what??" Kapsch and Q-Free devoted years of effort trying to expand in non-tolling ITS and it never worked. But ETC (or Quarterhill) doesn't need to do anything to expand into non-tolling ITS successfully. They've already got what two key competitors tried to build but couldn't. Why would you want to sell that?