This is Thanksgiving weekend in the United States; the country’s most congested travel weekend of the year. It’s common knowledge, and it’s easy to infer that this holiday weekend is one of the busiest for air travel. But can you prove it empirically? Apparently so. [Bertrand Fan] filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the WiFi traffic at San Francisco International Airport and used the access point data from the past year and a half to show which days were most congested in the airport.
FOIA actually has its own website which boils down the act as follows:
The basic function of the Freedom of Information Act is to ensure informed citizens, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.
We’re not sure if this particular data mining hack falls under that description, but it’s good to know if you want information about what government is doing, you can get it and fast! From the first request to receiving the info was just 10 days.
Ghostscript was used to turn the PDF into a CSV which was then plotted on a graph. It shows that the heaviest WiFi usage was on 11/26/17, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. As you can see, the only thing returned was data used per day for each SSID (plus dates which aren’t shown in this screenshot). But in theory the more people stuck at the airport the more data they’ll consume, so the method is reasonable.
This was all just to color a conversation he was having with his parents about the weekend’s travel. It’s a long way to go to prove a point, but we had fun joining along in the ride!
[via Lobsters]
10 days is pretty fast. I wonder what other data they’re collecting about the wifi…
All of it.
This proves nothing. Not even that the unusually low number of travellers on Thanksgiving use a huge amount of data.
Exactly. Data parsed this way might be totally biased.
Think about it: while myself and maybe you too are of the kind of users that utilize the aitport’s “free” wifi just to check for the weather at the desired destination (very low data consumption), I’ve also already observed some users watching streaming video (rather high bandwidth usage) while waiting for their plane.
Thus, the hypothesis of a correlation between high data usage and high number of travellers cannot hold up.
Unless you’re using something unique like MACIDs, DHCP requests and the like, that is.
Yeah firing up that Usenet downloader before going onboard is normal, isn’t it? :-)
Yes the headline should include “suggests”. Is hackaday turning into Gizmodo or Engadget? Clickbait is not necessary for our readership!