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

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.本研究针对某大型欧洲移动运营商的超百万用户，分析了其覆盖一年时长的匿名化电信数据，并探究用户通话行为与其实体地理位置之间的关联。研究发现，超过90%的互通过话用户曾共享同一蜂窝基站（cell tower）覆盖区域，即便二者实际居住距离较远。此外，本研究还发现，接近70%的高频互通话用户（平均每月至少通话一次）曾在同一时刻共享同一空间——我们将此类场景称为共现（co-location）。共现场景往往对应协调通话，此类通话通常发生在面对面会面之前。基于双方通话频次与家庭居住距离，即可高度准确地预测共现场景的数量，这为量化电信通信与面对面互动之间的相互作用提供了全新研究思路。