Generating Scalable Population Movement Insights

‍BT Active Intelligence is a suite of AI-powered solutions from BT Group, designed to help businesses optimize networks, enhance security, and improve digital operations. By leveraging real-time data, automation, and advanced analytics, BT Active Intelligence delivers actionable insights across multiple industries. These insights enable organizations to make data-driven decisions, predict trends, and drive efficiencies in areas such as government policy, transportation, and retail.

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As part of its commitment to digital transformation, BT needed a scalable, geospatial analytics solution to process vast amounts of mobility data and extract meaningful insights for various sectors.

To support its customers, BT Active Intelligence needed to generate accurate and scalable population movement insights that could be applied to multiple industries, including:

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• Government & Policy: Understanding commuting patterns, urban mobility, and the impact of infrastructure investments.

• Transport & Mobility: Identifying congestion hotspots, optimizing public transport routes, and improving urban planning.

• Retail & Location Strategy: Analyzing foot traffic, optimizing store locations, and enhancing customer targeting.

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The core challenge was processing billions of data points from mobile networks, accurately mapping individual journeys while maintaining privacy compliance, and generating actionable insights in real time.

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To achieve this, BT needed an advanced geospatial analytics platform that could handle large-scale data processing, visualization, and machine learning models for clustering and movement pattern detection.

BT developed a comprehensive mobility dataset using the following process:

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1. Data Collection: Mobile devices connect to the EE network (part of BT Group).

2. Location Estimation: Multiple network masts are used to triangulate device positions with high accuracy.

3. Journey Tracking: A dataset of latitude, longitude, and timestamp was built, averaging 500 pings per device per day.

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Scaling for Nationwide Insights

BT utilized CARTO to apply advanced geospatial analytics, clustering, and routing algorithms, enabling:

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• Journey reconstruction at scale – mapping movement patterns across the UK.

• Data expansion to represent the entire UK population while ensuring privacy compliance.

• Aggregation with other datasets to provide deeper insights: Demographics, Land usage, Weblogs & digital interactions, Public transport schedules, Home & work location estimations.

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By leveraging CARTO's geospatial capabilities, BT created a Journey Database, enabling organizations to:

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• Optimize transport networks based on real-world movement data.

• Improve retail site selection with footfall predictions.

• Guide urban development by analyzing population density and mobility patterns.

• Support government planning with up-to-date mobility statistics.

BT Active Intelligence chose CARTO for its industry-leading geospatial analytics capabilities, offering:

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1. Scalability & Performance

CARTO's cloud-based infrastructure allowed BT to process billions of data points efficiently, handling massive datasets without performance bottlenecks.

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2. Advanced Geospatial Analytics

With CARTO's built-in clustering and routing algorithms, BT could extract meaningful insights from raw mobility data, identifying population flows, travel patterns, and high-traffic zones.

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3. Powerful Data Visualization

Carto enabled BT to visualize mobility trends dynamically, making complex data accessible and actionable for stakeholders across different industries.

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4. Integration with External Datasets

The ability to merge mobility data with demographics, land usage, and public transport information helped BT deliver more comprehensive, data-driven insights.

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5. Privacy & Compliance

CARTO provided privacy-preserving analytics, ensuring all data processing met GDPR and data protection standards, making it a trusted solution for handling sensitive mobility data.