UrbanLogiq is the end-to-end data platform purpose-built for government. UrbanLogiq centralizes diverse data from within government and the private sector - regardless of type, source, or format - in a unified data platform.

One data source which we have experience in aggregating is public community wifi data. If you are interested in adding this workspace to your UrbanLogiq account, or if you are curious how UrbanLogiq can help your agency with your unique data needs, feel free to contact us!

UrbanLogiq’s Broadband Wifi Analysis workspace visualizes and aggregates Wifi Access Point data to provide detailed insights while seriously considering user privacy. This workspace will show you frequently used areas, which access points are the most reliable, and what internet activities are taking place on the wifi network.

In this Help Center article, you will learn how to use the Broadband Wifi Analysis Workspace and important data terms to best understand the report.

If you have any questions about this workspace after reading the material, do not hesitate to contact us:

Before we dive into how to best use this workspace there are some important definitions which you should know.

Access Point: a wireless access point is a device that creates a wireless local area network (WLAN) by projecting a WiFi signal from a router to a designated area. Today, the City of San José has more than 2,300 access points throughout the city. Access points are represented as points on the map, indicating the installed location.

Attendance Area: is a geographical area served by a public school. We use attendance areas to indicate a subset of the territory covered by the City of San José and to analyze access points in such areas. There are 11 distinct attendance areas in San José, and any access points that don’t belong to any of them are grouped in an attendance area that the city arbitrarily labeled “Others.”

MAC Address: a MAC (Media Access Control) address is a unique 12-character attribute used to identify individual electronic devices on a network. Thus, in practice, a MAC Address provides a unique identifier. Knowing that MAC addresses may be randomized as frequently as every 24 hours is critical. Therefore, if the same user connects to the Wifi router twice with the same device, once before and once after MAC address randomization, then it will result in a count of two MAC addresses, hence two devices, though the user was one.

These are some of the categories of data that our team at UrbanLogiq is familiar with, and are the data points which are repeatedly emphasized in the report. If your agency has unique public wifi data, or unquie needs, we are by no means limited to the functionality outlined in this Help Center article. If you have questions or specific requests please reach out to your UrbanLogiq representative.

All of the Access Point available for analysis will be seen on the map as a dot. The color of the point is determined by the average daily unique devices. You can click on the dot to see the Access Point name and its Average Daily Unique Devices.

Select the Time period which you want to pull a report for. If you are looking to pull a report for specific Access Points or a Attendance Area you can select one or multiple of those by adding a Filter.

Click the big blue button View report to generate the data you are looking for! Like all UrbanLogiq reports you can Export your findings into a PDF by clicking the blue Export button.

There are a couple of metric definitions which may be helpful for you to know when reading the report.

Session duration: This indicates how long a roaming session lasted. Session durations provide insights into the length of Wifi usage, Wifi stability, and frequency of Wifi connections. It always has units of seconds.

Traffic: This is the traffic volume, a sum of user traffic. This metric also includes all unicast, multicast, and broadband traffic. It is a measure of how “busy” the network is. Its unit is specified in the x-axis of the chart, and it is usually Megabytes, Gigabytes, or Terabytes.

Unique devices: This metric counts all client MAC addresses recorded over time. It is a proxy to understand how many users are connecting to the WiFi and proving how widely used it is by the population around those access points.

Unique sessions: represent the total number of unique roaming sessions for a given period. It is a proxy to understand how often the Wifi was used (compared to how many devices). A session begins when a Wifi client connects to an access point and ends when that client disconnects from it.

The Broadband Wifi Analysis report is broken down into three sections: Experience quality, Access points to watch, and Service demand patterns.

This section of the report shows at a high-level what the experiences of the wifi users are. When taking into account the experience of the public, we determine this based on multiple factors.

We will identify the ten lowest traffic access points, the top ten access points which require the most reconnections, the bottom ten access points for average number of sessions. Finally in this section of the report we will average out what application type the unique devices were using this public wifi for over the time period you selected.

If you want to further dig into the numbers, click the excel button on the left of a chart tile to see the graph in table form.

For Average daily unique devices by application type, we broadly bucket user data into the following categories: web, application service, network service, audio/video, instant messaging, webmail, encrypted, tunneling, game, and unknown.

Because many different applications which use an internet connection these categories are broad. The Web category would be the users browser (i.e. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.). The Instant Messaging category would be something like Facebook messenger, or iMessage. The Webmail category would be something like an email app. The Audio/Video category would include activity like listening to Spotify. The Application Service would include activity like downloading an app from the Google Play or Apple app store. The Network Services category would be activity which would require connection to an outside network to complete a task, a prime example of this would be financial services services like verifying a credit card to make a purchase online. The Encrypted and Tunneling category would be user activity. The Game category would include online video games like PokemonGO or Candy Crush. Finally, activity that can not be easily identified will go into the Unknown category.

We are trying our best to aggregate a tremendous amount of data, as well as maintain user privacy. There are near infinite amount of ways to use the internet. These application types are not perfect, but they do give a good idea of what the access point is being used for.

In this middle section we show access points, based on the month you've selected, may need some improvement or attention. Specifically, we will showcase access points which are having a high amount of data transfer as well as high amounts of daily unique devices.

What does this mean? It means these access points may improve quality of service by adding more bandwidth.

In this final section, we will highlight the unique sessions of users by time of day. This is a great way to see patterns when people are using the public wifi. Just like in the charts above you can click the excel button on the left hand side to see the specific unique devices.

Remember that these reports are looking at an entire months worth of data, so all of the numbers which you will see in this section are averages.

That sums it up for the Broadband Wifi Analysis Workspace in the UrbanLogiq platform.

At UrbanLogiq we pride ourselves on building the end-to-end data platform purpose-built for government. We centralizes diverse data from within government and the private sector - regardless of type, source, or format - in a unified data platform.

This is one of our many Workspaces that help government agencies make better decisions, you can find out more tutorials on our current Workspaces in our Workspaces section of our Help Center. You can also learn more on our website, https://urbanlogiq.com/.

If you have any questions about this workspace, please contact us: