Interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions - a study using mobile phone data
Francesco Calabrese, Zbigniew Smoreda, Vincent D. Blondel, Carlo Ratti

TL;DR
This study analyzes a large European mobile phone dataset to explore how telecommunications data correlates with physical co-location and face-to-face interactions, revealing patterns of coordination and social behavior.
Contribution
It introduces a novel quantitative approach to link call patterns with physical co-location, providing insights into social coordination and face-to-face meeting prediction.
Findings
Over 90% of call pairs share the same cell tower
70% of frequent callers are co-located at the same time
Call frequency and distance predict face-to-face coordination
Abstract
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…
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