  We investigate spatial patterns in mobile service consumption that emerge at
national scale. Our investigation focuses on a representative case study, i.e.,
France, where we find that: (i) the demand for popular mobile services is
fairly uniform across the whole country, and only a reduced set of peculiar
services (mainly operating system updates and long-lived video streaming)
yields geographic diversity; (ii) even for such distinguishing services, the
spatial heterogeneity of demands is limited, and a small set of consumption
behaviors is sufficient to characterize most of the mobile service usage across
the country; (iii) the spatial distribution of these behaviors correlates well
with the urbanization level, ultimately suggesting that the adoption of
geographically-diverse mobile applications is linked to a dichotomy of cities
and rural areas. We derive our results through the analysis of substantial
measurement data collected by a major mobile network operator, leveraging an
approach rooted in information theory that can be readily applied to other
scenarios.
