# Urban Vibes and Rural Charms: Analysis of Geographic Diversity in Mobile Service Usage at National Scale

## TL;DR

This study analyzes geographic patterns in mobile service usage across France, revealing limited spatial diversity mostly linked to urbanization levels and a small set of behaviors that characterize national mobile consumption.

## Contribution

It introduces an information-theoretic approach to quantify spatial diversity in mobile service usage and demonstrates its applicability to large-scale national data.

## Key findings

- Demand for popular services is uniform nationwide.
- Geographic diversity is mainly due to specific services like OS updates and video streaming.
- Mobile behavior patterns correlate strongly with urbanization levels.

## Abstract

We investigate spatial patterns in mobile service consumption that emerge at national scale. Our investigation focuses on a representative case study, i.e., France, where we find that: (i) the demand for popular mobile services is fairly uniform across the whole country, and only a reduced set of peculiar services (mainly operating system updates and long-lived video streaming) yields geographic diversity; (ii) even for such distinguishing services, the spatial heterogeneity of demands is limited, and a small set of consumption behaviors is sufficient to characterize most of the mobile service usage across the country; (iii) the spatial distribution of these behaviors correlates well with the urbanization level, ultimately suggesting that the adoption of geographically-diverse mobile applications is linked to a dichotomy of cities and rural areas. We derive our results through the analysis of substantial measurement data collected by a major mobile network operator, leveraging an approach rooted in information theory that can be readily applied to other scenarios.