How do people move around and spend time in different places? To design functional cities, create public transport that meets citizens’ needs or locate services where people actually need them, it is essential to have information about people’s behaviour. This is what Telia’s Crowd Insights provides.
Crowd Insights is an analysis tool that uses anonymised data from Telia’s mobile network to track the movement of crowds. The analyses are generalised to represent the entire population. Up-to-date information on mobility helps to design services that meet users’ needs.
“Crowd Insights enables better-informed decisions by providing continuous, comprehensive and reliable data on crowd movement patterns. The data can be used to understand how and where people move and spend time,” says Suvi Valkama, Commercial Product Manage at Telia.
Where people spend time and how they move
The key analyses of the service are dwell time analysis and trip analysis. Dwell time analysis looks at the number of visitors in a particular area at a particular time. Journey analysis shows where people are coming from and where they are going.
Both analyses can be enhanced with further information. For example, the travel analysis can be routed to the road network to give an accurate indication of the routes taken. A dwell analysis can be enhanced with information such as the likely location of a person’s home based on the first signal of the morning.
In Finland, Crowd Insights data has been used in various ways, such as monitoring crowd behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluating the effectiveness of mobility restrictions. It has also been used to assess how remote working affects greenhouse gas emissions from transport. Businesses have used the data to plan the location of electric car charging points and, in the tourism sector, to analyse passenger behaviour.
“We work closely with a wide range of industry specialists with whom we collaborate to deliver the data to end customers. Our key partners include Ramboll, Nortecon, Visitory, Salmi Platform and Esri,” says Valkama.
Data for the green transition
Telia Crowd Insights was also selected as the Data Economy Innovation of the Year at a gala event organised by AI Finland in October 2024. The award highlighted the international growth potential of the service as well as its large, positive impact on society.
Crowd Insights already has many good examples of use in both the private and public sectors, but there is still plenty of room for new innovations. Telia’s Suvi Valkama encourages the bold use of data to solve societal challenges:
“The most successful results are often those that combine mobile network data with other data sources. It would be great to see new applications under this theme that combine data with new, innovative data sources. We would also like to see data as part of the solution to key societal challenges, such as supporting the green transition.”
Do you want to test Telia’s Crowd Insights data and its usability? The Location Innovation Hub offers you the opportunity to test Crowd Insights data from specific areas free of charge to see how it works with your business idea. Telia is one of the associated partners of the Location Innovation Hub. Contact us using this form.
