The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives and how we use network infrastructures in an unprecedented way. While early studies have started shedding light on the link between COVID-19 containment measures and mobile network traffic, we presently lack a clear understanding of the implications of the virus outbreak, and of our reaction to it, on the usage of mobile apps. We contribute to closing this gap, by investigating how the spatiotemporal usage of mobile services has evolved through different response measures enacted in France during a continued seven-month period in 2020 and 2021.

Our work complements previous studies in several ways: it delves into individual service dynamics, whereas previous studies have not gone beyond broad service categories; it encompasses different types of containment strategies, allowing to observe their diverse effects on mobile traffic; it covers both spatial and temporal behaviors, providing a comprehensive view on the phenomenon. These elements of novelty let us lay new insights on how the demands for hundreds of different mobile services are reacting to the new environment set forth by the pandemics.

About André Zanella

André Zanella is a PhD researcher at IMDEA Networks Institute. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Telecommunications Engineering at the Federal University of Parana, in Brazil, where he previously worked on data modeling of microelectronic RF systems. He’s currently a part of the Networks Data Science group, working on mobile traffic analysis and remote sensing with network metadata, where his interests lay in developing techniques that help solving social sciences problems using information gathered by network operators.

This event will be conducted in English