Your Phone Is Already a Traffic Sensor: How Telecom Data Is Changing Mobility Planning

October 1, 2026
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Your city probably knows how many cars passed one intersection last Tuesday. But does it know where those drivers came from, where they were going, or how traffic changed on the roads no one counts? In most places, the honest answer is no. Telecom data is changing that, quietly turning millions of phones into the most comprehensive traffic sensor cities have ever had, without revealing a single identity.

Counted for a week, trusted for years

It’s 07:40 on a Tuesday. A commuter leaves Jelgava, a city just south of Riga, and drives across the border to Šiauliai in Lithuania. No camera records where the trip began. No survey asks where it ends. And no traffic counter in either country knows that the same trip will happen again tomorrow, and the day after.

The mobile network, however, already knows the shape of that journey. Not who made it – just that it happened. Add up thousands of anonymous trips like this, and you get something transport planners have wanted for decades: a picture of how a whole region really moves, hour by hour, including on roads with no sensors and across borders where national statistics stop.

Here’s the surprising part: most roads are still measured the old-fashioned way. A crew lays rubber tubes across the asphalt or sets up a roadside radar, counts the traffic for a week or two, then packs up and moves on. Those few days can become the official picture of that road for years. In Estonia, only 115 permanent counting stations covered the entire state road network at the end of 2024 – everything else relied on short-term counts. In both Finland and Estonia, some smaller roads may wait up to five years for their next count. Meanwhile, a new logistics hub, a busier border crossing or a bypass can change traffic overnight.

So what can the phones in our pockets tell cities that cameras and counters can’t? And how can that work without putting anyone’s privacy at risk? Let’s take a look – and see how Fits.FlowInsights, the newest module of Fits Traffic, is bringing this approach to Baltic municipalities.

How Your Phone Becomes a Data Point

Your phone is never really offline. To deliver calls, messages and notifications, the mobile network always needs to know which nearby antenna (or “cell”) your phone is connected to. Every call, text, app refresh and routine background check leaves a small trace of that connection. The network keeps these records for its own everyday needs – billing, keeping the service running smoothly – long before anyone thinks of them as mobility data.

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Not just calls

Early research looked only at calls and texts, so a phone showed up only when someone actually used it. Today’s methods also include the automatic signals every phone sends as it moves around. That makes the picture far more detailed. Why does it matter? Someone who never touches their phone on the way to work would be invisible in call records – but still shows up in the fuller picture.

From dots on a map to real journeys

Raw network events aren’t trips yet. Smart software first works out roughly where each phone is, then spots when it’s staying put and when it’s on the move. It filters out noise – like a phone “jumping” between two antennas while it sits on a desk – and adds everything up by area and time of day. The result is a simple “who goes where” table: how many people travel from each area to every other area. That kind of table has been at the heart of transport planning for decades.

Why it’s not as simple as it sounds

A stronger signal doesn’t always mean a phone is closer to the antenna. Radio waves bounce off buildings, bend around hills and get absorbed by walls, which can shift a phone’s apparent location by tens or even hundreds of metres. That’s why good mobility analytics needs radio engineers as much as data scientists – and why working with mobile operators and specialist partners matters so much.

What Phones Can See That Cameras Can't

Phone data doesn’t replace cameras, road sensors or surveys. Its value lies in answering the questions they were never built to answer.

 

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The whole journey, not just one point

A camera at a junction counts the cars passing by. It can’t tell you where they came from or where they’re going. Ticketing systems have a similar blind spot: they show where you got on and off, but not where your journey really started or ended. When Danish National Railways (DSB) wanted to improve its timetables, it combined anonymised mobility data with ticket data to see real door-to-door demand.

Every road, not just the main ones

Mobile coverage reaches almost every road, village and border crossing – including the quiet rural roads that would never get a permanent sensor. In Finland, a year-long pilot by Fintraffic, the national traffic management company, showed that telecom data could measure traffic on secondary roads fully automatically, with no field crews needed. Estonia’s Transport Administration reached the same conclusion in its own pilot, then named regional public transport planning as the next area to explore.

Before and after

When Bergen in Norway opened a light rail line between the city centre and the airport, mobility data showed how the new line changed the way people moved around the whole city – not just how many people rode the tram. In Sweden, a project led by Linköping University, KTH and the Swedish Transport Administration combined phone data with public transport card data to forecast traffic on individual roads in the near term.

Crowds in near real time

On Norway’s Constitution Day in May 2026, Telcofy split central Oslo into zones and compared live, anonymised crowd levels with a normal weekend. At the peak of the parade, the busiest zone had around seven times as many people as usual for that hour – and the crowd’s movement towards the waterfront was visible within minutes. For event organisers, emergency services or public transport operators, that kind of real-time overview is hard to get any other way.

Europe Is Getting Serious About It

What started as academic research and one-off pilots is gradually becoming part of Europe’s official data infrastructure.

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Towards official statistics

Europe’s statistics community sees phone network data as one of the most promising new sources for future statistics, with Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, leading the way. Eurostat has already developed the first version of an open, shared method for working with this data – for topics such as population and tourism. One key lesson: the most reliable results come from combining data from several mobile operators with traditional statistics.

A shared European mobility data space

The European Commission is also building a common European mobility data space. The idea isn’t one giant database of all EU mobility data, but a set of shared rules that let existing systems exchange data safely and under control. Its first rollout project, deployEMDS, is already putting this into practice at pilot sites across Europe.

Operators are stepping in

Mobile operators are getting involved too. Telefónica Germany, for example, offers anonymised mobility insights drawn from billions of network events every day, and reports that they have been used for public transport planning in Leipzig and Munich. The direction is clear: phone data is moving from occasional studies to an everyday planning tool.

Privacy Comes First

Any conversation about phone data has to start with privacy – and rightly so. In July 2026, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published new draft guidelines on anonymisation. They explain when data stops being personal, and expect organisations to prove – not just claim – that their data is truly anonymous. Location data is one of the cautionary examples: even with names and numbers removed, one person’s daily movements can reveal where they live and work. Data that is added up into group totals, on the other hand, is much harder to trace back to any one person.

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In practice, responsible mobility analytics follows a few simple rules:

  • Data stays with the operator. Individual phone records are processed inside the operator’s own systems. Only summary figures ever leave.
  • Safety in numbers. Results are shared only for areas and time slots with enough people that no one can be singled out.
  • Crowds, not individuals. What’s analysed is movement between areas – never an individual phone or subscriber.
  • Methods are documented, so public authorities can explain to residents where the numbers come from.

For public sector clients, this kind of clarity is essential for trust.

OmniFlow-1: Mobility Data Without Borders

The Baltics show exactly why this matters. Commuters, freight and visitors cross the Latvian-Lithuanian border every day, but traffic data is usually collected and analysed separately on each side. National statistics stop at the border. People don’t.

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OmniFlow-1 is an EU Digital Europe Programme project launched in August 2026 to make mobility data work across borders. dots. is the project coordinator and lead solution partner, with Fits Traffic as the core platform. The project brings together mobile operators Bite Latvija and Bite Lietuva, mobility data specialist Telcofy AS, mobility consulting firm MC Mobility Consultants and municipal partners.

Two cities, one picture

The solution is being piloted in Jelgava (in Latvia) and Šiauliai (in Lithuania). The goal: give both cities a shared, comparable view of how people move within and between their regions – and across the border – based on anonymised data from operators on both sides.

Sharing, not stockpiling

In line with the European approach, OmniFlow-1 doesn’t gather everyone’s raw data in one place. Operators keep control of their own records, and only privacy-safe results are shared, under clear rules everyone has agreed on. This makes it possible to combine data from several operators and countries – exactly what Eurostat says is needed for reliable results.

Fits.FlowInsights: Where Telecom Data Meets the Road

OmniFlow-1 is the project; Fits.FlowInsights is the product growing out of it. It’s a new module of Fits Traffic that brings anonymised telecom data into the same platform that public authorities, cities and traffic management centres already use for their roadside sensors.

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Two views, one platform

Fits Traffic already uses smart cameras to count and recognise vehicles, keep an eye on junctions and run traffic surveys, and lets cities monitor all their roadside equipment in one place. These sources are very precise – but only at specific points. Telecom data fills in the rest: where journeys start and end, how traffic connects across a region, and what happens between the points that sensors cover.

Together, they make each other stronger. Camera counts give accurate local figures that help check and fine-tune telecom-based estimates. Telecom data, in turn, explains what those counts mean – for example, whether more traffic at a junction comes from local residents, regional commuters or people crossing the border.

What it means for cities

For a city like Jelgava or Šiauliai, Fits.FlowInsights is designed to help answer questions that are otherwise hard to crack:

  • Where is there enough demand for a new or changed bus route?
  • How many people actually commute across the border, and when?
  • How did a road closure, a new bypass or a big event change the way people move around the area?
  • Which unmonitored roads are busy enough to deserve further investment?

For public authorities, the value isn’t just in the data, but in answers they can explain, defend and act on.

Conclusion

Mobile networks have quietly become one of the most complete traffic sensors cities have. They cover roads no one counts, journeys no survey captures and borders that national statistics rarely cross. Across the Nordic and Baltic countries, transport authorities have already moved from testing this data to using it, while Eurostat and the European Commission are laying the groundwork for its wider use.

Phone data won’t replace cameras, road sensors or surveys. Its real strength shows when it’s combined with them – with strong privacy protection and the know-how to read the signals correctly. Through Fits.FlowInsights, dots. and its partners are bringing that combination to the Baltics, starting with Jelgava and Šiauliai. The goal is simple: to help cities see not just how many cars pass a given point, but how people actually move.

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