Not All Apps Are Created Equal: Analysis of Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity in Nationwide Mobile Service Usage

Abstract

We investigate how individual mobile services are consumed at a national scale, by studying data collected in a 3G/4G mobile network deployed over a major European country. rough correlation and clustering analyses, our study unveils a strong heterogeneity in the demand for di erent mobile services, both in time and space. In particular, we show that: (i) somehow surprisingly, almost all considered services exhibit quite di erent temporal usage pa erns; (ii) in contrast to such temporal behavior, spatial pa erns are fairly uniform across all services; (iii) when looking at usage pa erns at di erent locations, the average tra c volume per user is dependent on the urbanization level, yet its temporal dynamics are not. Our ndings do not only have sociological implications, but are also relevant to the orchestration of network resources.