Compare Cell Phone Usage in Various Cities
October 8, 2015
Ever wonder how cell phone usage varies around the globe? Gizmodo reports on a tool that can tell us, called ManyCities, in their article, “This Website Lets You Study Cell Phone Use in Cities Around the World.” The project is a team effort from MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory and networking firm Ericsson. Writer Jamie Condliffe tells us that ManyCities:
“…compiles mobile phone data — such as text message traffic, number of phone calls, and the amount of data downloaded —from base stations in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. It’s all anonymised, so there’s no sensitive information on display, but there is enough data to understand usage patterns, even down the scale of small neighbourhoods. What’s nice about the site is that there are plenty of intuitive interpretations of the data available from the get-go. So, you can see how phone use varies geographically, say, or by time, spotting the general upward trend in data use or how holidays affect the number of phone calls. And then you can dig deeper, to compare data use over time between different neighbourhoods or cities: like, how does the number of texts sent in Hong Kong compare to New York? (It peaks in Hong Kong in the morning, but in the evening in New York, by the way.)”
The software includes some tools that go a little further, as well; users can cluster areas by usage patterns or incorporate demographic data. Condliffe notes that this information could help with a lot of tasks; forecasting activity and demand, for example. If only it were available in real time, he laments, though he predicts that will happen soon. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, October 8, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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