Subspotting

Getting a cell phone signal on the subway can be hard - even in cities like New York.

The Subspotting project captured the cell phone reception along the complete NYC subway network for the four main carriers. Using a custom-built measuring app, we traversed the whole 660 miles of track. The resulting unique dataset shows in detail how strong the signal will be at a given point on a given line.

Subspotting makes this dataset usable and available as a low-resolution interactive visualization on the project website and as a free iOS app . Finally, as a more decorative entry, the Subspotting dataset is also available as two beautiful posters.

The project - a collaboration between Daniel Goddemeyer and myself - encompassed the complete data science process from measuring data with a custom tracker, via in-depth data processing and wrangling to creating visualizations and an app.

Learn more about the project here.