[HN Gopher] Visualization of 40M Cell Towers
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Visualization of 40M Cell Towers
Author : alprc
Score : 141 points
Date : 2021-02-17 18:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alpercinar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alpercinar.com)
| clort wrote:
| This looks pretty cool
|
| However, I have an issue. I'm looking at this area (south coast
| UK) and there are many dots _in the sea_ which are clearly not
| cell towers?
| vilius wrote:
| When visiting USA for the first time I was surprised how often I
| would be in a no reception zone. Drove just away from Miami to
| Everglades National Park - no reception for miles. Drove from SF
| to LA via Highway 1 - no reception for miles. Being from Europe I
| just took cell coverage for granted and always have assumed USA
| has the same.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| While the US does have a lot of no cell zones, those areas do
| have coverage. I wonder if your phone operated on GSM bands
| that didn't cover those areas. For a while in it was pretty
| common that if you wanted coverage in rural areas you opted for
| Verizon's CDMA network.
| addled wrote:
| 40 million... I knew there was a lot, but didn't realize that
| many. Another comment says closer to 5 million physical towers,
| still a lot.
|
| A lot of these towers have GPS receivers for clock syncing as
| well, don't they?
|
| Back in college I had a geology prof who was using GPS receivers
| planted in one spot to measure seismic / tectonic movements from
| one year to the next.
|
| That was over 10 years ago, and I never looked into it much more,
| but seeing all those dots reminded me again.
|
| I've wondered what kind of resolution they could model with data
| from the hundreds of cell towers in the area vs the handful of
| stations they maintained?
| tumblewit wrote:
| makes me realise the internet is so powerful that the idea of
| 'voice calling' has now completely changed to 'data exchanging'
| devices. I mean if you think about it cellular will soon lose its
| 'cell' meaning. The idea of phone numbers might not go away but
| everything will likely be IP based which means it doesn't matter
| how your packets are routed technically.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I've yet to see any voice chat app work as well as cellular
| calls. Until then, it's still a phone with a computer attached.
| vel0city wrote:
| Don't worry, pretty soon the reliability of standard calls
| will be roughly the same as most good voice chat apps with
| the switch for all carriers to implement VoLTE. Maybe still a
| little more reliable as it won't directly rely on the public
| internet, but overall still a SIP/IP-based VoIP system as
| opposed to the dedicated call channels which were the
| standard previously.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Why would cellular lose its "cell" meaning? The radios are
| still cellular which means a small geographic space in served
| by a particular directional physical antenna(s).
|
| Your phone only needs to be able to hit the antenna in its
| cell. It doesn't need to talk to other phones or more distant
| antennas. This is what allows phones have have relatively low
| power radios that reside in your pocket without big external
| antennas.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| TIL "cellular" refers to the imagined interconnecting shapes
| when mapped, not the battery technology as previously
| thought. unsure why this term was popularised over the pre-
| existing "mobile" but there we go
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think that we should just use the word "phone" from now
| on, we don't need to say "cell" or "cell phone", this is
| the just the phone. Even though it has a lot more jobs as a
| smartphone, messaging and communication generally is still
| the main job.
| teeray wrote:
| This has already happened in LTE--everything is packet-based
| and any traditional "telephone" things are provided as a
| service (from a system call the IP Multimedia Subsystem) on top
| of that. IIRC, 3G networks were the last to make some
| distinction between packets and voice circuits.
| ethagknight wrote:
| This is great, really interesting visualization.
|
| Surprised at how unlit China is, due to restricted data?
| kube-system wrote:
| I was browsing the forum of the data source -- looks like there
| are some users expressing that the China data is significantly
| out of date. I would bet that the applications which collect
| this data are not common on the other side of the firewall.
| mssundaram wrote:
| The link to OpenCellid is interesting
|
| > Locate devices without GPS
|
| So I guess they offer triangulation between towers to find where
| a device is?
| kube-system wrote:
| I think they're suggesting something much more simple than
| that:
|
| SELECT lat, lon FROM tower_list WHERE tower_id=${The one you're
| connected to};
| jahbrewski wrote:
| Damn. Humanity really is just one large brain.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| This is cool; one note - I think there's a very visible typo in
| the visualization - the legend refers to '(3G) UTMS' - should be
| 'UMTS' I think?
| kiwijamo wrote:
| You're correct! Nice find.
| h1fra wrote:
| wow amazing viz. More than 200K in Paris area this is insane !
|
| (nb: this would deserve a more granular zoom or shape drawing)
| kiwijamo wrote:
| This probably counts cells (i.e. a cell will be a service from
| an antenna facing in a specific direction broadcasting on a
| specific frequency) rather than towers. One tower can operate
| several cells--especially true for 3G and 4G where many
| carriers now do carrier aggregation across more than one
| frequency (and thus more than one cell). My local tower for one
| operator alone has 12x 3G cells (3 antennas facing N/SE/SW
| which each carries 2x 900 MHz carriers and 2x 2100 MHz
| carriers). For 4G the same 3 antennas carries 700 MHz, 1800
| MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz services (for a total of 12 cells).
| So it adds up pretty quickly.
| paulgb wrote:
| Using a WebWorker as a tile server for more compressed underlying
| data is a clever approach!
|
| Are you doing anything special to compute the totals in real-
| time, or just summing over the entire selection each time the
| cursor moves?
| alprc wrote:
| just summing the selection area around the cursor
| anakaine wrote:
| Displaying so many points is something spatial people have
| struggled with for a long time. Would you consider writing a
| leaflet plugin that helps with your approach?
| ape4 wrote:
| CDMA is only in USA and Japan from my informal mousing around.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's pockets in more places. A handful of countries had
| fixed wireless CDMA for home phones where it was difficult to
| install wires, and many of them have opened up regulations for
| those carriers to do mobile CDMA as well.
| jzebedee wrote:
| Mexico (e.g., Guadalajara), the Caribbean (particularly
| adjacent to Puerto Rico), and northern Colombia and Venezuela
| seem to have pockets of CDMA as well.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| On the map, there appear to be small handfuls in Canada, even
| though Bell and Telus shutdown those networks in 2019 and 2017,
| respectively
| mrtksn wrote:
| Okay the world looks extremely well connected. What is Starlink's
| potential user base? Are there a lot of people in the dark parts
| of the map?
|
| There's this tendency of maps showing something about humans
| actually being a population maps simply because the stuff
| displayed happens where human activity happens.
| varenc wrote:
| This is just a map of cell towers. Many people with cell
| service in their area might not have access to a broadband
| internet service. Internet access via cellular doesn't really
| compare in terms of costs and speed/latency. (At least in the
| US, cost per GB over cellular is way too high)
| marc__1 wrote:
| The potential user base is massive once you move away from the
| urban centers in the developed world.
|
| Take a look at Lagos, Nigeria. Population is ~15m for ~80k
| towers. Only 1.4k (1.7%) of them are 4G LTE with the remaining
| either 3G or CDMA.
|
| Or the State of Sao Paulo, in Brazil (home of 22% of Brazil's
| population and 33% of the country's GDP). Approximately 573k
| towers, 76k of which are 4G
|
| For comparison, the greater Boston area has ~107k towers and
| 58k are 4G.
| samizdis wrote:
| Is 5G subsumed under 4G for this visualisation?
|
| (Really pretty, by the way.)
| superkuh wrote:
| Almost all 5G deployals around the world are 5G non-standalone;
| they have 4G LTE basestations doing handset control and 5G
| modulations (on their own frequency span) for data transfer.
|
| Unrelated, this can't be a map of cell phone towers. It's
| probably a map of cell phone basestation locations.
| samizdis wrote:
| OK, thanks for that. I was wondering whether there was a way
| to break out the 5G from 4G in the visualisation. Also, I'd
| thought (perhaps wrongly) that many more 5G stations were
| necessary for coverage in a given area than 4G/3G because of
| the shorter physical range.
| breck wrote:
| This is incredible. Thank you!
| wiredfool wrote:
| I'm really curious how much space a png rendered set of tiles
| would be. He mentions that the oceans compress well, but the
| usual method is to simply not render detailed tiles in ocean
| regions.
| anakaine wrote:
| I think the is rather that there's no pre rendering of the
| tiles serverside, even dynamically. Its all client side. Ie,
| updates should just require a dataset update, not a
| regeneration of map tiles for a tile store in the case of pre
| rendering. And no need for a spatial server.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Judging from the data requested, there are essentially either
| prerendered blocks of data, or they're live API calls. So
| there's still a data transform step.
|
| The data that's coming down looks to be bigger than I'd
| expect for a PNG tile.
|
| On the other hand, it's a pretty cool way to do a multiband
| raster.
| just_steve_h wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1138/
| jandrese wrote:
| It makes sense that the towers are installed where people are,
| but note that this only holds true for first world nations.
| Africa has plenty of underserved areas. Or go and see if you
| can find the border between North and South Korea. You can also
| see the border between India and China quite clearly.
| zwieback wrote:
| Awesome map. Rural west of the US is still pretty spotty
| kube-system wrote:
| Reminds me of the inverse of this map:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825390
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| This is beautiful data visualization and would make a great metal
| poster (e.g. displate). Have you considered selling merch made
| with this data? I am sure it would sell.
| mraza007 wrote:
| Really interesting visualization and I definitely love the map. I
| am amazed the way you handled such large amount of data
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm not sure how this was done, or how cell towers really work
| (or where they exist) but many of them appear to be in lakes,
| rivers and so on. What's wrong here, my understanding or the map?
| jemurray wrote:
| This would make a neat piece of art on the wall. I love thinking
| of the intersection between technology and neural-pathways, this
| reminds me of that.
| pininja wrote:
| This is an incredible visualization! Thanks for detailing how you
| tiled their huge dataset too. Packing the data into RGB channels
| as you did is really powerful - I've only seen this done for
| elevation tiles. Do you have a code link to how you're performing
| the cursor-brush aggregations?
|
| This seems like it could be an awesome application of an cloud-
| optimized geotiff (COGs) for serverless tiling. I'm curious if
| you ran across this tech in your research?
|
| I'm not sure where your project will take you, but I'd encourage
| you to continue! I got a lot of exposure to the vis.gl community
| when I worked at Uber, and still contribute - Here are some
| relevant links you may get ideas from.
|
| COG demo: landsat8.earth GPU tile processing:
| https://kylebarron.dev/deck.gl-raster/overview/ Elevation tile
| decoding (also uses workers):
| https://loaders.gl/modules/terrain/docs/api-reference/terrai...
| mxfh wrote:
| It shows cell 40M Cell IDs. The number of physical cell towers is
| probably somewhere around 5 million. Given that the cell per
| tower factor was ~7 in 2014 and we got more standards to cover
| today.
|
| https://wiki.opencellid.org/wiki/FAQ#I_know_where_cell_tower...
| teeray wrote:
| I'm fond of https://www.cellmapper.net/ for a more local view.
| It's helpful for answering questions like "why do my calls always
| drop when I drive into region X?" and "why is coverage shit in
| this area?", also "what cell carrier should I get if I plan to
| move to X?"
| rplnt wrote:
| All I see is a blue void (tried two browsers) - do I have to
| click something?
| markovbot wrote:
| it gave me a very zoomed in view of what I assume is Null
| Island (GPS coordinates 0, 0). Zooming out several times
| eventually reveals map elements.
| DuskStar wrote:
| Looks like it starts at 0,0 - zoom out on the map to find
| land
| capableweb wrote:
| I had to select a Provider on the left side before the masts
| starting showing up.
| vetinari wrote:
| If your browser doesn't have your location for whatever
| reason, most maps will drop you into lon 0, lat 0, which is
| South Atlantic Ocean west of Africa.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Great site, nice to see where the local towers are. I wanted to
| know what tower my phone was connected and this app gave me the
| Cell ID (CID)
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wilysis.ce...
| which matched the map. Super cool!
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(page generated 2021-02-17 21:00 UTC)