Telia unveils solution to prevent overcrowding on the beaches

Are you longing for the beach this summer but want to keep your distance?? To avoid overcrowding, Swedish seaside municipalities have teamed up with Telia and launched a solution, Telia Crowd Alerts, which warns beachgoers of packed beaches before heading there.

In order to avoid big crowds on the beaches this summer, the popular Swedish summer destinations of Höganäs and Mörbylånga have turned to Telia and come up with a new mobile function that warns visitors of crowded beaches.

Wifi sensors are placed in boxes (“wifi sniffers”) on the beaches to capture anonymous signals from visitors' mobile phones. The data is aggregated in real time and the system alerts when the amount of people rise above a predefined threshold. The solution is integrated into the municipalities' apps and websites, enabling users to easily see how the situation is on the beaches before heading there.

Kim Ahlqvist, communications manager in Mörbylånga municipality, who together with Telia came up with the idea, explains the simple functionality: the green, yellow, or red codes show the status of the beaches and how crowded it is there.
“Green means there are not so many people there, and if it’s red it’s crowded and you should go somewhere else,” says Kim Ahlqvist.

“It is great that we have been able to quickly adapt an existing service, in close collaboration with Höganäs and Mörbylånga, so that they can provide a smooth service to residents and visitors. I hope it helps making the holiday experience both a little better and safer,” says Kristofer Ågren, Head of Data Insights at Telia.

Telia Crowd Insights and Telia Crowd Alerts are solutions that analyze anonymized and aggregated data, such as mobile network data to get insights on how crowds move and visualize travel patterns, or activity/density in a wifi network to identify the population density in a smaller area.

Telia Crowd Insights, launched commercially in 2017, are commonly used in urban and community planning, for example when drawing a new bus line, building a road or seeing visitor flows outside a store.

During the corona epidemic, the Swedish Public Health Authority has used Telia's anonymized data to understand how groups of people move, for example between municipalities and regions or within a city. It provides important insights into the work to slow down the spread of infection, based on statistics and data.