VMO2 to supply user data to UK Government for ‘mobility insights’

The IDS is a cloud-based platform providing governmental bodies access to a data repository, in order that they can ‘make data-driven policy decisions’ on things like public health, regional growth, climate change, jobs and skills.

The anonymised data from VMO2 will be used at national and local level to provide information on population dynamics, travel patterns, and other movement trends.

IDS is currently operating in public beta, but we’re told data releases will scale at pace over the coming months with a planned pipeline of additional capabilities.

O2 Motion data will also be integrated with ONS surveys and administrative data sources in order to create a series of publications covering topics like small area population estimates. These will be publicly accessible on the ONS website as part of a regular release.

“We are proud to extend our partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and to integrate our aggregated and anonymised O2 Motion data into their Integrated Data Service (IDS),” said Geoff Wappett, Head of AI and Data Insights at Virgin Media O2 Business. “Generated from billions of daily network events, our mobile data will provide governmental organisations and officials with reliable information to inform their work addressing major societal challenges at pace. Beyond numbers, the IDS platform and our wider work with ONS will ensure quality insights are easily accessible to support data-driven decision making.”

VMO2 periodically puts out reports based on the data it collects via its O2 Motion unit, looking at things such as the rate at which commuters were returning to the office post pandemic, traffic spike events, and where brits are going on holiday.  

It’s not always obvious why it makes the effort to do this, other than to generate a bit of PR of course, but plugging that data into a system which gives policy makers some tools to hopefully make smarter decisions about how the country is run sounds in principle, and in general, like a good thing.