Interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions - a study using mobile phone data

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 interactions.