Interplay between Telecommunications and Face-to-Face Interactions: A Study Using Mobile Phone Data

• Main Authors: Calabrese, Francesco (Contributor), Smoreda, Zbigniew (Author), Blondel, Vincent D. (Contributor), Ratti, Carlo (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SENSEable City Laboratory (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science, 2011-10-03T21:07:29Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

In this study we analyze one year of anonymized telecommunications data for over one million customers from a large European cellphone operator, and we investigate the relationship between people's calls and their physical location. We discover that more than 90% of users who have called each other have also shared the same space (cell tower), even if they live far apart. Moreover, we find that close to 70% of users who call each other frequently (at least once per month on average) have shared the same space at the same time - an instance that we call co-location. Co-locations appear indicative of coordination calls, which occur just before face-to-face meetings. Their number is highly predictable based on the amount of calls between two users and the distance between their home locations - suggesting a new way to quantify the interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions.
AT & T Foundation
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant number 0735956)
Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
General Electric Company
Volkswagen Foundation
IBM Research
Orange Labs (France)
France. Société Nationale des Chemins de fer français
Ente nazionale per l'energia elettrica