What to do with big data? Everyone talks about it as if it’s some elusive holy grail, but do companies really understand how to use it and do operators really have the tools to enable that usage?
Inrix has announced a new platform to provide population analytics that can help mobile network operators leverage their so-called “big data” to develop new revenue streams. The platform utilizes anonymized and aggregated mobile network and GPS data points to provide insights to the movement of populations. Governments, transport authorities, city planners, retailers and advertisers can leverage this data for planning future infrastructure development and offering new services.
Machina Research projects the market for smart city analytics alone to be $1 billion by 2020. These expenditures would be focused on defining requirements to upgrade the transportation infrastructure to allow for better urban mobility. In order to understand the motivation for these expenditures, the Center for Economics and Business Research expects the annual cost of gridlock in European and U.S. cities to reach $293 billion by 2030, reflecting a 50% increase from 2013. This creates an opportunity for mobile operators to monetize the information they already have available by providing tools to those organizations that need to analyze population movement statistics.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of how it all works – visually.
By monitoring the movements of the population of central London on New Year’s Eve one can understand how crowds form and move around during the course of the evening. This could help with security planning, transportation requirements, mobile network infrastructure load analysis and potentially marketing of New Year’s Eve specific service offers.
The second video shows the movements within Manchester, England, on a typical day. You can see where travelers originate and end their journeys. In addition to understanding transportation requirements, local retailers can have tools available to them to help better understand the time of day when most purchases are made based on the level of population in their area.
Mobile operators already have a great deal of data in-house. Being able to monetize this data into ongoing services offers new opportunities to drive revenue streams previously not realized.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
