Our safety and alerting products work with geographic zones: a country, a region, a flood-warning area. A zone is a set of polygons, and those polygons decide, cell by cell, who gets alerted. That last part is what makes this a more interesting problem than it looks. This post is the write-up of a hackathon project that started as “these polygons are too big, let’s simplify them” and ended somewhere more subtle: you cannot simplify a coverage geometry the way you simplify a geometry you only want to draw.

Objective

Expertise in location data is at the core of Intersec technologies. Retrieving and exploiting such data from cellular networks helps us address use cases in various fields like public safety, location-based advertising or smart cities and territories.

When dealing with raw locations retrieved at an antenna level within these networks, a central challenge is to infer when a device is staying in the same area or when it is moving. What might seem simple when we think about GNSS trajectories (for example, based on GPS coordinates) is not that easy when we have to handle antenna-based locations.