Smartphones and mobile applications are staple tools in the operation of current-age public demonstrations, where they support organizers and participants in, \eg scaling the management of the events or communicating live about their objectives and traction. % The widespread use of mobile services during protests also presents interesting opportunities to observe the dynamics of these manifestations from a digital perspective. Previous studies in that direction have focused on the analysis of content posted in selected social media so as to forecast, survey or ascertain the success of public protests. In this paper, we take a different viewpoint and present a holistic characterization of the consumption of the whole spectrum of mobile applications during social protests. Hinging upon pervasive measurements in the production network of the incumbent network operator and focusing on the 2023 French pension reform strikes, we unveil how large masses of protesters generate a clearly recognizable footprint on mobile service demands in the examined events. In fact, the footprint is so strong that it lets us develop models informed by the usage of selected mobile applications that are capable of (i) tracking the spatiotemporal evolution of the target demonstrations and (ii) estimate the time-varying number of attendees from aggregate network operator data only. We demonstrate the utility of such privacy-preserving models to perform a-posteriori analyses of the public protests that reveal, e.g., the precise progression of the marches, alternate minor routes taken by participants or their dispersal at the end of the events.

The roll out of 5G, coupled with the traffic monitoring capabilities of modern industry-grade networks, offers an unprecedented opportunity to closely observe the impact that the introduction of a new major wireless technology has on the end users. In this paper, we seize such a unique chance, and carry out a first-of-its-kind in-depth analysis of 5G adoption along spatial, temporal and service dimensions. Leveraging massive measurement data about application-level demands collected in a nationwide 4G/5G network, we characterize the impact of the new technology on when, where and how mobile subscribers consume 5G traffic both in aggregate and for individual types of services. This lets us unveil the overall incidence of 5G in the total mobile network traffic, its spatial and temporal fluctuations, its effect on the way 5G services are consumed, the way individual services and geographical locations contribute to fluctuations in the 5G demand, as well as surprising connections between socioeconomic status of local populations and the way the 5G technology is presently consumed.

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: (i) it delves into individual service dynamics, whereas previous studies have not gone beyond broad service categories; (ii) it encompasses different types of containment strategies, allowing to observe their diverse effects on mobile traffic; (iii) 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.

We study the interaction between the consumption of digital services via mobile devices and urbanization levels, using measurement data collected in an operational network serving the whole territory of France. We unveil that such an interaction follows a power law, or, in other words, there exists an emergent behavior that prompts subscribers living in increasingly extended and populated urban areas to exhibit a surging individual consumption of mobile traffic. The result holds for the global traffic, but is also consistently observed across a range of mobile services, although with varying intensity. An unprecedented longitudinal analysis of the phenomenon unveils how the imbalance in the per-capita mobile data traffic usage across cities of different size has grown steadily and substantially in the 2014–2019 time frame in France. Our study raises questions on the presence of second-level digital divides in developed countries, and paves the road to further investigations.