Mobility of Indonesian during Early Pandemic: Insights from Mobile Positioning Data

Mobile Positioning Data (MPD) contains information on the location of the mobile phone by approximating mobile phones’ location relative to fixed infrastructures (e.g., telecommunication towers that transmit signals). While the data query is technically straightforward, obtaining this dataset requires particular permission to protect customers’ privacy. Additionally, the dataset has large volumes of data (i.e, up to 300GB per day), resulting in not many researchers holding this data source to analyze the mobility of people. In this work, we collaborate with one of the biggest telecommunication service providers in Indonesia to collect MPD and prepare the big data infrastructure. We thus analyze mobility patterns during the early phase of COVID-19 in 2020 using actual Mobile Positioning Data in five provinces in Java. We use three metrics, namely, the number of visits, averaged travel distance, and Origin-Destination matrix. The findings indicate that the social restriction in the corresponding provinces has reduced the average traveled distance of the people, but not their number of visits. That is, while the traveled distance has declined more than eight times compared to the baseline, the number of visits may rocket up, up to nine times. It indicates that people are still having shorter trips even though their regular activities (working, schooling, etc.) have been restricted. The data also show that during Ramadhan month, the government has a successful intervention in restricting people for mudik Lebaran, The number of visits dropped to below 30 visits during Ramadhan and only small spikes exist during ‘libur lebaran’.