I was curious about how many cell towers were around me - so I built the tool I wanted.
Providers here keep saying they’re adding more towers, improving coverage, investing in infrastructure. But the signal never seems to get any better. I wanted to see the actual data.
The idea
Brazil’s telecom regulator, ANATEL, publishes data about every cell tower in the country, but it’s not something easy to visualize. IBGE publishes population data, so we can do per-capita calculations. I figured: what if I put all of this on a map?
So I spent a couple of hours during the weekend vibing it together, and temsinal.org was born.
All of Brazil’s cell towers
Why
The real motivation is civic. I want to be able to look at my city, see how many towers we have, how old they are, and compare that with what providers and the city hall are promising, and with neighboring cities.
If a provider says they’re expanding 5G coverage, the data should reflect that. If the city approved new tower installations, they should show up. If nothing changed, that’s also useful to know.
The goal is to have data to back up questions - to city hall, to providers, to anyone who should be held accountable. Maybe even drive some change in local government to make people’s lives better.
How
The data pipeline is pretty simple: a few Python scripts that fetch tower data from ANATEL and municipality data from IBGE, process everything, and generate map tiles using tippecanoe.
The frontend is a straightforward map interface consuming the generated
.pmtiles and .json files.
Deploy is done in Cloudflare Pages and R2.
The whole thing is open source.