OpenCelliD, in figures
OpenCelliD is a crowdsourced database of mobile cells, run by Unwired Labs, and it is the largest openly published collection of its kind: records of which cell a phone saw, where. It covers the whole world rather than one country, and its operators publish a statistics page that is updated continuously. The figures below are a snapshot taken on 17 September 2026; the live table is on their page, linked at the foot of this one.
The remainder is GSM (2G), UMTS (3G) and a small number of CDMA records. A few countries, chosen to show the range rather than to rank anyone, with Switzerland for comparison:
- Germany — 3,180,507 cells
- France — 2,657,486 cells
- Spain — 1,152,068 cells
- Austria — 629,611 cells
- Switzerland — 347,358 cells: 75,799 GSM, 142,557 UMTS, 127,551 LTE, 1,451 NR
What those numbers are, and what they are not
They are logical cells observed across the history of the project, not installations. Its own page is careful about this and so is this one: a logical cell is a carrier, a band and a sector identity that some phone recorded; several of them can sit on one physical antenna, and a cell that nobody has ever had a reason to record may be missing entirely. The database states that logical cell counts only loosely correlate with physical towers, and that its exports include only data observed in the last 18 months — so the totals are a picture of what has been seen recently, not a register of what exists.
That is the difference from the data this map draws. The Swiss register used here is an administrative one: which installations are permitted to transmit, where, with what power class. A crowdsourced database is an observational one: which cells somebody's phone noticed. Both are useful, they answer different questions, and neither can be converted into the other by dividing one by the other. Switzerland appears in OpenCelliD with about 347,000 cells against the roughly 22,500 installations in the official register — a ratio that reflects how many sectors, bands and carrier layers each site runs and how much of it has been recorded, not how many masts stand in the country.
For a reader who wants to compare exposure rather than count hardware, the useful point is that coverage is not a proxy for exposure. Two countries with the same number of cells per square kilometre can differ by an order of magnitude in the power a person actually receives, and the figures on this page say nothing at all about how much field strength anyone lives in. The modelled map is the place to ask that question, and its Radiation levels page is where the measured Swiss values are.
Why this is a snapshot and not a live feed
Two reasons, one technical and one about doing the right thing by somebody else's work. This site is a set of static files: there is no server of ours to fetch a page on a schedule, and the statistics page does not offer a cross-origin API, so a browser cannot read it directly either. An embed — framing their page inside this one — would load their servers on every visit to ours, would break the moment they changed their markup, and would present their numbers as if they were part of this site. So the figures are quoted, dated, attributed and linked.
On the rights of it: aggregate figures are facts and are not copyrightable, so quoting a dated snapshot with attribution is ordinary practice and is what is done here. The database is a different matter — OpenCelliD publishes its data under its own open terms, and anything built from the records themselves should be taken from the source and keep those terms. Nothing on this page is copied from it beyond the totals shown above, and this site is not affiliated with OpenCelliD or Unwired Labs and implies no endorsement in either direction.
OpenCelliD statistics, live — opencellid.org/stats.php →
Figures as published on 17 September 2026 by OpenCelliD / Unwired Labs · quoted with attribution · nofollow link, no affiliation