Cellular connection map of the U.S.

An MIT map of AT&T cellphone calls [via Gizmodo] reveals something about the interconnectedness of U.S. regions.

This constant flux of people commuting, migrating, and travelling across the country establishes connections which are dominated by large cities. The social connections woven across the United States can be used to define communities, where the glue that holds a community together is a stronger relationship with other members of the same community compared to members of other communities.

The team created a similar map some times ago for the U.K.:

• [eaglescout1984]

  I guess no one in Washington DC uses AT&T.

• [royaltrux]

  Apparently I live in a call-over state, sigh.

• [Anonymous]

  Really makes the midwest look isolated, doesn’t it? It would be interesting to scale the results by inverse of population density, to get an average idea of how interconnected the average person is.

• [fraac]

  Intrinsically meaningless but useful like Chris Rock, says Andrew Gelman: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2011/07/different_goals.html

• [dheisel]

  More useless visualizations out of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. They have been putting these videos and images out for years now. It looks all fancy and cool, but there is no substance or utility. The most remarkable part is how the managed to get the telecom companies to give them all the cell phone call records.

• [Anonymous]

  Wow are all those black areas dead zones with no coverage?

• [Anonymous]

  No I don’t know this map. My map of the United States includes Hawaii and Alaska.

• [Dawn deMom]

  I live in Montana. After Verizon bought Alltel they had to sell their Alltel in Montana. AT&T bought the network. People could either leave Alltel or stay and those who stayed, believing this was a reliable network that would work for Montana were very shocked when their phones went online and they couldn’t get out from their much-too-rural-for-GSM service. People lined up in Havre to return their phones, get out of AT&T, and try to find something that would work. Verizon isn’t much better. They constantly drop calls, something I had not had happen much of in 10 years with Cellular One/Alltel.

  I see Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming – all states where there is no AT&T service. Knowing this is done before AT&T came to Montana, it makes me wonder if this shows the future, too, in that we still have no reliable AT&T service in Montana!