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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00433 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00433/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Predicting Socio-Economic Well-being Using Mobile Apps Data: A Case Study of France](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09986/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.