ATEED is using people's mobile phones to work out where they come from to attend festivals such as Diwali.

Auckland officials are using mobile phone data to analyse where people attending events in the city come from so that they can plan better.

Auckland's economic development agency ATEED is utilising mobile phone information from Spark to monitor people's attendance at events such as the Lantern Festival and Diwali.

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ATEED Auckland's annual Lantern Festival has become so popular it is likely to be moved to the Domain.

Spark's big data subsidiary, Qrious, looks at where a phone has been over a period of time, so it can work out where the owner is likely to live, ATEED chief executive Brett O'Riley said.

"We don't know who you are, but we'll look at a number," he said.

The information is allowing ATEED to make better decisions such as how much public transport to provide.

For instance, it knows that 78 per cent of attendees at February's Lantern Festival in Albert Park live within a 20km radius.

Just over half of attendees live within a 10km radius, while a third came from under 5kms away.

A Qrious spokesman confirmed the information was anonymised.

"We don't track individual people on the Spark network. What we do is we aggregate and we anonymise to a mesh block level," the spokesman said.

"No one is really interested in who [individually] moves from A to B. We're interested in who moves en masse."

In data terms, a mesh block can be a full suburb or a large part of one, for example Grey Lynn East.

"The council has come to us on a number of occasions to see who moves from [for example] Grey Lynn to the CBD and we are able to say there's this many people and this is the time they leave."

The data aggregated by Qrious is only gathered from Spark network users, which means crowd numbers still need to be extrapolated.

"It only gives you an approximation."

Only when phones are in use can they be analysed and their data collected, the spokesman said.

The accumulated data of a Spark phone user's journey can be tracked by which cell towers the phone connects with, but individual users are not being monitored, he said.

"When a user uses their mobile phone, that mobile phone connects to a cell site ... and that location is recorded.

"The phone has got to be connecting in some way to the network. It can be a data connection or it can be a voice [or text] connection.

"It's not GPS. We use raw network information."

ATEED also released its results from the 2014/15 events season, including the Cricket World Cup and the FIFA Under-20 World Cup.

The agency invested $14 million into major events over the summer.

The investment created an injection of $85.6 million into Auckland's economy.

More than two million people attended major events in the city over the season, generating 426,500 visitor nights.

The 2014/15 season was unparalleled, O'Riley said.

"The difference for the year just gone is we had some one-off events which required significant scaling-up for us," he said.

The city wouldn't see such a big season again until 2017/18 when it hosts the World Masters Games and three matches in the British and Irish Lions tour.

Meanwhile the popular Lantern Festival has grown so large that in 2016 the event is having to be moved from its traditional home in Albert Park.

The likely new location will be the Domain, and ATEED is currently applying for resource consent to hold it there.

O'Riley said the biggest events for this summer will probably be the NRL Nines and the Lantern Festival, with a unique feature of the calendar being the visit of the Pop-Up Globe, a temporary full scale replica of Shakespeare's Globe theatre.

ATEED's Major Events Strategy has a 10-year outlook from 2011 to 2021, and has so far exceeded targets.

By 2021 it is expected to have delivered $472m into the regional economy and 1.65m visitor nights.

To date it has already delivered $204m into the economy and 1.26m visitor nights.

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