Graph of cell towers over time?

[neokio]

On the homepage, there's the excellent "Statistics Over Time", which shows a graph of # of WIFI networks between 2002 and 2020.
Is there a similar graph for cell towers, showing # of towers over those years? Or some way to find out how many towers there were in the world in 2002?

Thanks!

[arkasha]

hey neokio,

That's a good idea - we haven't treated cell and bluetooth as "first class citizens" in a lot of our site yet - we need to fix that. One warning here: we can only graph "what our crazy army of hobbyists, security professionals, and obsessive runners/walkers/drivers/emergency workers have SEEN" - so we can't speak for how many there were, just how many the unstoppable WiGLE horde had seen at the time. If that's a useful proxy for what you want to do, then glad to help!

-a

[neokio]

That's a super useful proxy! I'm very much interested in WiGLE's growth-over-time curves for all RF bands.
Even if the sampling is relative and incomplete, it's extremely informative.
WiGLE seems to be the only resource offering useful data – not to mention transparency – on an otherwise secretive topic.
I look forward to participating in the experiment

Do you track which networks (2G/3G/4G/5G) are used by the towers/antennae?

Edit: Also, I'm an advanced PHP dev, let me know if I can be of service.