Tour de Paris II

The Cell ID collection in Paris begins today. We have a willing candidate ready to walk over 100km round the heart of Paris covering 20 square kilometres from Bastille to the Arc de Triomph and from Opera to Montparnasse. He’ll be carrying three mobiles, one with GPS, and each connected to a different operator network. The GPS phone has to be held out to continually receive a signal, the other two will be in his pocket, capturing time-synced data to re-synthesize back at base with the GPS coordinates. It’s a somewhat risky affair, because they’re nice phones and could be attractive to thieves ... but at least he won't be stopping on every corner to decide where to go next: the whole itinerary has been worked out to ensure that we get maximum coverage for minimum distance walked based on an earlier test we carried out at Bastille. The results will come through each half day and by this time next week we’ll have a complete database of tower cells in the main areas of Paris. Then it’s on to London to do it all over again – but this time it will be 200km on foot because London is enormous!