Mobility Insights: mobility data
Mobility Insights: create value from mobile movement data
Reliable data is the basis for good decisions and thus for the success of companies and organisations. Through Mobility Insights, Swisscom, the Swiss mobile market leader, provides anonymised and aggregated mobility data from smartphones.
Climate-neutral product
Your benefits
- Understand people’s actual movement behaviour
- Evaluate POS, advertising space and event locations based on genuine data
- Analyse volumes in tourism as well as in private and public transport
When is it the right solution?
Do you know where, when, how and how many people move in your specific market or area of planning or research? Acquire this knowledge and optimise the planning of tourist attractions, events, advertising campaigns, points of sale and infrastructure courtesy of aggregated mobility data. Offering the right product or service at the right time in the right place is vital.
Why Swisscom?
- Unique: movement data from 6 million SIM cards across Switzerland
- Data protection: sophisticated anonymisation ensures legal compliance
- Data quality: continuous optimisation through the use of machine learning
The first step
Our products at a glance
Mobility Insights explained
Learn how Mobility Insights makes high-quality mobility data accessible.
Additional information
Mobility Insights solutions
A wide range of Swisscom partners use movement data from Mobility Insights as the basis for their services and platforms. Find out here how the insights are being used by various industries and areas, and the associated benefits.
Customer success stories
Tourism forecasting
Plan capacities for optimal service
Customer situation
How many visitors can be expected at a particular destination? This is of interest both for tourism companies that want to plan their capacities and for travellers. Switzerland Tourism wanted to be able to provide this information.
Our solution
Together with Swisscom, Switzerland Tourism implemented a 7-day forecasting model for around 500 destinations in Switzerland. Not only does Swisscom supply the mobility data, it also developed the algorithms with the integration of further data sets.
Location decisions
Invest where your customers are
Customer situation
It usually only becomes apparent in retrospect whether it is worth opening a retail outlet in a particular location. In order to determine the best locations for their Shops, the Swisscom Shop team wanted to analyse relevant data.
Our solution
Swisscom Mobility Insights offers a tool for simulations and forecasts based on mobility data. Factors, such as demographic structure, location characteristics and cannibalisation effects are also analysed. This information was then used to plan relocations within cities, which prompted a significant increase in sales.
FAQ
What is Swisscom’s Mobility Insights?
The Mobility Insights Portal is an online tool where customers can access anonymised group statistics for different mobility scenarios. Analyses of aggregated mobility data provide a better understanding of mobility behaviour in Switzerland and allow data-driven decisions to be made in areas where the mobility behaviour of the population plays an important role (e.g. anonymous traffic flow evaluations in municipalities).
What is a Swisscom Mobility Insights API?
Mobility Insights now offers three APIs:
- Heatmaps: calculation of population density per 100m x 100m quadrant and per hour for Switzerland. Time frame for data retrieval: from the previous day to two years ago.
- Dwell Times: the times people or vehicles spend in a particular geographical area in Switzerland on a particular day – from the previous day to two years ago.
- Origin Destination: the API provides information about the number of trips between two or more regions in Switzerland by weekday, weekend or calendar month.
Data is updated every 24 hours and historical data is available on a rolling basis for up to 2 years. The Swisscom Mobility Insights API is available on the Digital Marketplace.
What is the Swisscom Digital Marketplace?
The Swisscom Digital Marketplace is an intermediary platform for digital products that can be used over APIs. Swisscom’s Digital Market Place aims to facilitate the use of digital products and transactions between providers and users. The platform is owned and operated by Swisscom. See the product catalogue for an overview of the digital products that are currently available. You can create a free demo account to familiarise yourself with the available data sets and to test the APIs.
What information can our customers receive through the Mobility Insights?
The Mobility Insights Portal provides customers with visualised statistics on such data as the average number of kilometres travelled by the population in Switzerland in one day. This data is completely anonymous. There is no way of identifying individual persons from this data. What’s more, the evaluations are not provided in real time. Our customers do not receive any location or other mobile data from Swisscom, but only evaluations based on such data.
What is the legal basis for the Mobility Insights?
The legal basis for the Mobility Insights Portal and the associated data processing is Art. 45b of the Swiss Telecommunications Act (TCA). Under this regulation, telecommunications service providers may process anonymous location data of their customers or, with their consent, may also process location data for services outside of the provision and billing of telecommunications services.
Where does the data used by the Mobility Insights originate from?
The Mobility Insights Portal uses data that is generated when Swisscom customers use a mobile device (network events): the IMSI number of the SIM card, the date and time the SIM card interacted with the mobile network and the identifier of the mobile communication mast with which the SIM card interacted.
How are network events processed and supplied to the Mobility Insights?
The network events for a calendar day are extracted from the mobile communication systems automatically the following night. At the same time, the IMSI number is replaced by a hash automatically and with no human involvement. The resulting data thus consists of the time, a hash identifier and the radio cell. The position of the SIM cards is then determined by a positioning algorithm which uses probabilistic triangulation to convert the hashed network events into geographical areas. Finally, the geographical areas are transferred by aggregation into quadrants of 100 x 100 metres. The entire territory of Switzerland is divided into such quadrants. After aggregation, the quadrants show the number of SIM cards that have remained or moved within them over the course of a particular hour. If the number of SIM cards detected by Swisscom in a quadrant is less than 20 (k-anonymity), the MIP does not provide any evaluations of this quadrant. The team processing the hashed network events has no access to data about the SIM card holders.
Is it possible for the Mobility Insights to identify or monitor the holder of a SIM card?
No, this is not technically possible. The evaluations provided on the Mobility Insights Portal are merely an approximation of reality. Swisscom can only determine the position of a SIM card approximately for technical reasons. The median position of a SIM card determined by Swisscom differs from the actual position by around 130 metres. The median represents the radius. In reality, the SIM card in question will have been located somewhere within a radius of 260 metres around the position determined by Swisscom. This radius has an area of around 53,000 m2. As a result of these discrepancies, the position determined by Swisscom may appear in a different quadrant than the one in which the SIM card was actually located. Identification of a SIM card holder is technically not possible under these circumstances, especially given the fact that the reports represent historical information and a k-anonymity of 20 is guaranteed by default.
Is it possible to opt out of location data reporting for your own SIM card?
Yes, the holder of a SIM card can opt out of location or mobility data reporting for the card online on My Swisscom or via the Swisscom hotline.
