Urban gravity: a model for inter-city telecommunication flows

Abstract

We analyze the anonymous communication patterns of 2.5 million customers of a\nBelgian mobile phone operator. Grouping customers by billing address, we build\na social network of cities, that consists of communications between 571 cities\nin Belgium. We show that inter-city communication intensity is characterized by\na gravity model: the communication intensity between two cities is proportional\nto the product of their sizes divided by the square of their distance.\n