TowerMaps US Cell Tower Database

Someone has been writing down where America's antennas stand since 1997, and kept at it. TowerMaps US Cell Tower Database is a standalone GIS inventory of United States cell towers and wireless antenna sites - more than 600,000 antenna-site locations consolidated from several hundred site owners, assembled by tracking over 600 tower companies across more than 25 years. Buyers are working analysts, not tourists: site-acquisition firms, M&A shops and map-integration builders.

Two construction choices make it behave differently from the regulatory registries beside it. First, scope: it counts structures the government does not - buildings and rooftop installs sit outside the FCC's registration regime, and here they are first-class records sorted into their own site class. Second, the commercial layer: each record carries who owns the structure, who sells space on it, whether the site is open for collocation, what the zoning says and how tall the steel stands - attributes a registration ledger was never designed to hold. Equally deliberate is the absence: carrier tenancy appears nowhere, because carriers treat it as confidential, and the publisher says so rather than quietly leaving gaps.

Within Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets averaging 7.81, this record scores 6 out of 10 - unmatched owner-level depth against column spellings that were not published upstream and get pinned at sampling. Get a sample of this dataset cut to a state, a metro or a height band, and judge the rows before anything else.

One record per physical structure, with the owner-level attribute groups riding along:

# one antenna site - delivered grain is one row per physical structure
latitude            : 39.244170       # decimal degrees, NAD83
longitude           : -77.558330
site_class          : Tower (Guyed)   # one of eight structural classes
height_agl          : 190             # feet above ground level
construction_status : Built
site_availability   : Collocation available
zoning              : <parcel zoning as recorded>
owner_company_name  : <owning tower company>
sales_agent_contact : <agent name / phone / email / website>
fcc_registration    : <ASR number where available>
faa_registration    : <FAA number where available>

# the same spine wearing a different class - rooftops count here,
# which is precisely where federal registries stop counting
site_class          : Building or Rooftop
height_agl          : 62
construction_status : Proposed
site_availability   : Fully leased

# utility structures ride identical keys
site_class          : Utility Structure
height_agl          : 85
construction_status : Under construction

Read the anatomy, not the values - those are illustrative shapes, and live rows ship with your sample. One record fixes where (coordinates in decimal degrees on NAD83, the specification's definitive siting location, ahead of any street address), what (site class and height above ground level - a 190-foot guyed mast and a 62-foot rooftop install are different animals wearing the same keys), whether it can earn (construction status and availability separate leasable steel from proposals) and who owns it (the company of record, with its sales agent attached).

Because every structural class wears the same spine, a corridor-wide collocation screen is a filter, and an owner-versus-owner footprint comparison is a group-by rather than a research project.

Seven attribute groups define the core record, mapped below with types, definitions and examples drawn from the publisher's own specification during cataloging:

• latitude / longitude - the definitive location. Decimal degrees on NAD83, the pair every map drop and distance computation starts from, with street addresses deliberately second.
• site_class - the structure taxonomy. Eight classes from guyed, lattice, monopole and self-supporting towers through utility structures to building-or-rooftop and land parcels - the column that keeps rooftop installs visible instead of vanished.
• height_agl - the vertical fact. Height above ground level as maintained by the owner, feeding line-of-sight, interference and fall-zone math.
• construction_status - built, under construction or proposed. The difference between steel you can lease and steel still on paper.
• site_availability - whether the structure is open for collocation or leasing. Prospecting lives or dies on this column.
• owner_company_name - the landlord of record, and the join key every ownership rollup hangs on.

Beyond the grid sit six further groups that arrive populated on records but fold under additional fields on request: zoning, the sales-agent contact bundle with its internal name/phone/email/website split, street address, free-text construction details, and the FCC and FAA registration numbers that appear where available. Their exact delivered column spellings were not published upstream, so they are confirmed against live records when your sample is cut rather than approximated here.

Geography - the United States, all states: 600,000+ antenna-site locations consolidated from several hundred contributing site owners. The mix matters as much as the total - tower classes dominate the count, but rooftop and utility-structure records are present as first-class citizens, which is exactly the segment the federal registration regime never carries.

Temporal - continuously compiled since 1997 and carried as current-state records: a row describes the site as it stands when captured, with no version archive behind it. There is no longitudinal panel to subscribe to, which is precisely what the daily, weekly or hourly delivery cadence is for - scheduled captures append snapshots and accumulate the trendline your question needs.

Granularity - one record per physical antenna site or structure, carrying owner-level attributes and classified across the eight structural classes. Nothing sits below structure level: no tenants, no leases, no carrier equipment lists - by the publisher's own design and stated openly.

Set against the wider catalog - 1,744 datasets averaging 7.81 - the telecom tower REITs slice holds 14 cataloged datasets averaging 7.36, and this record scores 6/10: owner-level depth no public registry matches, held back by unpublished column spellings and the absence of a published state-by-state completeness statement. Where it ranks inside the slice: best telecom tower REITs datasets.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and set the cadence to match the decision being fed. Spatial layers sized for a map stack, flat tables sized for overnight warehouse loads, or a direct pipe into Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

Every delivery ships the field dictionary above unchanged, sample rows for validation keyed to the geographies and site classes you named, and one grain throughout - a row per structure - so an owner-versus-owner density comparison or a corridor collocation screen is arithmetic, not stitching. Because records are current-state, scheduled captures at your cadence are what build history; tell us the trendline you need and the schedule produces it. Get a sample of this dataset first; the ongoing arrangement follows once the rows validate.

Six jobs the record earns its keep on:

• Site acquisition and collocation prospecting - filter by class, height band and availability, then work the listed agent directly. One of the sharpest tools in the shelf serving competitor tracking from the property side.
• Competitive footprint mapping - plot owner-attributed concentrations metro by metro and watch whose steel dominates which markets, quarter over quarter.
• M&A and portfolio diligence - reconcile a target's claimed site count against independently consolidated inventory before the data room closes; density gaps surface early or expensively.
• Market sizing of the US tower stock - count structures by class, height and geography to state denominators from inventory rather than estimates; the same discipline behind the wider market sizing shelf.
• RF planning and densification studies - coordinates, heights and structural classes form the physical layer under coverage and interference models.
• Map and product integration - a typed, owner-attributed site layer behind logistics, real-estate and infrastructure products, arriving as rows rather than screenshots.

Each job maps to a persona below, and the sample validates whichever one you came for.

Competitive Intelligence & Product Teams get the tightest fit - owner-attributed site geography is the property-level evidence beneath every tower-market competitive read; see the competitive intel x telecom tower REITs workflows. Market Researchers & Consultants (relevance 2) get inventory denominators that make US tower-market sizing citable - market researchers x telecom tower REITs. Investors & Quant Researchers (2) set the physical footprint beside issuer disclosures, testing reported portfolios against consolidated ground truth - investors & quants x telecom tower REITs. Sales & Growth Teams (2) convert availability flags and owner contacts into call lists for collocation and equipment. Developers & Data-Product Builders (2) get one flat record per structure with stable keys - see the developers & builders x telecom tower REITs integration notes. Data Scientists & ML Engineers (1) mine coordinate-height-class features, accepting the current-state caveat as a design constraint - data scientists x telecom tower REITs. Persona-by-persona detail lives on the telecom tower REITs data hub.

Provenance note - compiled and maintained by Tower Maps, the Lovettsville, Virginia firm that has tracked more than 600 tower companies since 1997 and consolidates several hundred site owners into the single inventory behind this record. The source name stays attached to every delivered field.

Scope note - this record is the property layer: where the structures stand, how tall, whose they are, whether space is for sale. Securities-side reads on the three public landlords belong to the market-data neighbors such as Nasdaq Listed Quote Pages for Tower REITs (AMT/CCI/SBAC); pairing the two prices both the landlord and the assets underneath.

Completeness note - Datadory scores this record 6/10. The seven-group core dictionary is verified against the publisher's own specification; zoning, contact internals, addresses, construction-detail text and the registration-number columns fold under additional fields on request, with exact column spellings pinned against live records at sampling. No state-by-state completeness statement is published upstream, and the publisher itself treats the federal registration database as incomplete and frequently erroneous - so reconcile against FCC Data Hub Licensing and Tower Data before leaning on either alone for market-share arithmetic.

Where to go next - the telecom tower REITs data hub holds the rest of the slice, OpenCellID Bulk Downloads adds the global logical-cell layer, Wireless Estimator - Tower Industry News and Database contributes the ownership league table, and the Data.gov Cell Tower Datasets Catalog surfaces municipal inventories. The cell tower database glossary entry unpacks the vocabulary.