I was curious about the spotty cell phone coverage in my area and looked into it, expecting to be able to find complete maps of all the cell towers, and which system they were part of, on the web with ease. But there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this. There are at least thousands of web sites with partial information, but even the most elaborate web sites list a variety of reasons their information is incomplete. Many of these reasons sound like secrecy, more or less, but without a stated motive.
Doesn’t each cellular service provider know where all their towers are, and in convenient computerized form, for the purpose of deciding where to plant the next few? Don’t they want to advertise their coverage? After all, a cell tower provides a location to buy their product, in a sense. What vendor doesn’t want customers to be able to find them?
For that matter, cell towers are easy to spot and easy to catalog, and since they intrude into airspace I’m sure they get reported to whatever mapmakers supply aviators. The towers themselves are obviously not secret per se. Some web sites that draw on public records, though, caution that not all towers are captured in the public records they use.
is an AT&T 3G embedded street map. Seems very complete. With streets in little Rock and specific tower locations. There’s even a search box where I entered a street address. All embedded on the google page.
And to answer the question, yes, my impression is the same; the cell companies are not too keen on disclosing their tower locations.
I believe the main reason is because people have an irrational fear against mobile phone antennas and they wouldn’t feel very comfortable if they knew there’s one right opposite their house.
Another reason might be that the antenna was erected illegally, at least that is the reason where I leave (Greece). The legal framework here is outdated and way too strict and if everything was to be followed to code, several areas would have no coverage at all. So they go on and erect the antenna without all the paperwork filled out. Occasionally these illegal antennae are found and dismantled, only to be erected somewhere nearby.
And a funny anecdote: There was a village in Greece where the people complained about a cell antenna and wanted it removed. They got a court order and the cell company complied and removed the antenna. But it was the only antenna in the area and all cell phones went dead. Then people started asking the cell company to put the antenna back on :smack:
People are crazy. They have 5 mobile phones each and they want to have coverage everywhere, including basements and such, but they don’t want the evil antennae :rolleyes:
I believe some cell providers view this as proprietary information, and don’t want to publish it.
I’m not sure I understand the reasoning, but I remember times at work when we had to reverse engineer cell maps in order to debug some issues. And this is to make cell phones to sell to those carriers! If they aren’t telling us…they probably aren’t telling the general public.
That’s not to say the information isn’t available…
-D/a
That’s pretty common. It’s an easy way to bring in some income for the parish as rent.
A lot of people complain about cell towers as simple eyesores, so it’s not like the company really wants to call attention to the towers themselves. In Southern California they try to disguise them as palm trees. They actually are obvious when they do this, because palm trees are rarely perfectly straight.
Antennasearch seemed to have a pretty complete listing of the cell towers and antennas, but it’s not telling what services use the antennas. I suspect this is the OP’s gripe – there are 264 antennas within four miles of my house, but for all I know 263 of them may be exclusive to Sprint.
I guess the reason for this is because the cell carriers themselves don’t own the antennas. Indeed, there may be a lot of jockeying for the right to use the tower in a given location, and everytime the lease expires, the carriers using it may change.
Cell sites that add to a carrier’s contour have to be registered with the FCC and are public information. For instance, here’s the license of the New York City A side cellular carrier.
Their tower map was the best I had found, but their caution is typical:“The FCC does not require every antenna structure to be registered, and the map may or may not list all the towers in the area. Additionally, many carriers have sold their tower assets to third party companies, and leasing agreements are unknown.”
I had checked into this one before. Unless I’m mistaken, this isn’t about cell towers, it’s about ALL antennas, on towers or not, for all radio services public and private. Is that how you understand it?
Yeah, but once you search you can see results for antennas or towers. When I search near me, all the cell towers are labeled as belonging to certain cell companies and other towers, like my cities tower for police, fire etc, have a different icon. That could just be in my area though. Who uses the towers may be confusing. I have an AT&T cell phone and none of the towers near me are owned by AT&T, but I still have great reception. I know cell companies share towers but I don’t know if that’s true for every tower in the country or what, so I don’t know how you’d find cell coverage near you. Is a tower enough or does it sometimes have to be your carriers tower?
Towers and antennas are different things. Towers are just big tall structures. Antennas are the actual electrical equipment that radio equipment, including cell phone equipment, uses. An antenna can be on a tower, but it can also be on something else, like the roof of a building or a water tank. A lot of times, you can have multiple antennas on one tower. Also, often, towers aren’t owned by the companies that use them. Another company (American Tower is probably the biggest) will build the tower and rent out space on it to telecommunications companies that want to use it.
If you want cell service, you have to be in range of your company’s actual antenna (or an antenna of a company you have roaming service with).
But all of these antennas are for cell phones, right? They don’t show antennas for other things, do they, and if they do, what would those other things be? Ham radio?
Okay, but you’re not going to have a tower listed here without a cell phone antenna, right? We’re just trying to figure out if we can determine which companies are being served by any given structure (or antenna on a structure).
The point being, that those antennas could be serving several companies. So does that also mean that any given one antenna can serve only one company?
In the United States, most wireless facilities require some kind of zoning approval from a city, town, village or county. Zoning records are public information, although you may need to do some digging, or submit a FOIA request.
Most cities in the US now require towers above a certain height to include provisions for co-location, or accommodation of two or more providers. Some towers are “spec”, not owned not by the cell phone companies, but by firms such as American Tower, who leases tower space to wireless service providers. Some towers may be owned by a service provider, but built with co-location in mind; they’ll lease spots to other companies.
