How to find accessible free Wi-Fi at tourist spots in Japan

Abstract

We propose a method of finding spots at tourist attractions that do not have accessible Free Wi-Fi by using social media data. Although it is an important issue for the government to determine where they should install Free Wi-Fi equipment, it involves a high human cost. We focused on the difference in usage of social network services (SNSs) to find where there was a lack of Free Wi-Fi. We posed two simple hypotheses: (1) uploaded photos on Flickr, where batch-time SNS reflects the popularity of attractions from the travelers’ perspective, and (2) posts on Twitter, where real-time SNS reflects the communications environment. Differences in the distributions of posts in these SNSs indicate the gap in needs and the current status of communications infrastructures. Experimental results obtained from fieldwork in the Yokohama area clarified that although our method could locate places that were popular with tourists, some of these locations did not have Free Wi-Fi equipment installed there.