Thomas Landspurg, a software engineer and mobile entrepreneur, starts OpenCelliD out of a simple frustration: there's no open database of cell tower locations. He builds one, and invites the world to fill it in.

Markus Semm, founder of ENAiKOON, assumes maintainership in spring 2013. He funds the infrastructure personally, rebuilds the backend to handle the growing load, and cleans up the dataset.

He builds custom contributor apps, forges a partnership with Mozilla's Location Service around a shared export format, and steadily grows the contributor base. By 2014 the database holds over 5 million unique cell IDs with 2 million new measurements arriving daily.

After four years of stewardship, Markus passes maintainership to Unwired Labs in July 2017. At the handover: 35.5 million unique cells, 2.1 billion measurements, 50,000+ contributors and developers.

The community gets a forum, cloud infrastructure, and expanded coverage across more radio types.

Growing every day

Over 45 million records spanning GSM, CDMA, UMTS, LTE, and 5G NR. Contributors around the world keep uploading new measurements every day.