[meetups323]

Crazy to see just how dense Europe is -- I've been a few times and always assumed I was just "in the popular areas", that's why there wasn't any open land. But no, CA for instance has many swaths of <1k towers at the zoom level I tried, and to find similar density in Europe required going all the way over to rural Turkey/Belarus/Ukraine region. Pretty much all of the western European countries were entirely 10k+ at that same zoom level.

[autocorr]

I've been playing around with this map and a similar map of population density[1]. I wouldn't be surprised if this cell tower map was almost one-to-one match to a light pollution map: the contrast between North and South Korea is just as stark in the radio as in the visible!

But generally you're right, if you zoom out on the population density map, there simply isn't that level of distributed population Central Europe as anywhere in the United States. Europe is more similar to parts of India, China, and West Africa/Nigeria. It looks like the US most closely matches parts of Eastern Europe or Western Russia, but the US cities are substantially more suburban and "fuzzy". Aside from the stark difference between Kiev and Atlanta, in terms of population density the Eastern US seems most similar to Ukraine.

[1] https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/

[bane]

This data isn't complete. There is cell service in North Korea for example (with some caveats), but the data just doesn't seem to be present here.

[bigiain]

And as a local, how sparse most of Australia is...

Comparing Sydney to San Francisco and London at the same zoom levels is fascinating (to me) and trying to find other areas on the globe as sparse as the dark bits of Australia is also fun...

[femto]

In a testament to how urbanised Australia is, on maximum zoom level I can put the square on Sydney's CBD and get 22,500 base stations, then without scrolling put the square on an area of bush and get 0 base stations.

It would be neat to see the gradient magnitude of the density of base stations, as it might be a measure of a country's degree of urbanization?

---

Edit: Turns out it's not that hard to find areas of 0 base stations near major cities.

[bigiain]

I found it interesting scrolling around the globe with the "cursor" set to the zoom level where it contains all of Tasmania.

That gives me 160k entered over Sydney (Canberra up to Tamworth approximately), 124k over Melbourne, and places/areas of single digits are easy to find in the outback. It also gives me 300k entered over San Francisco, and 1.2million over London. (with easy to find spaces of zero in north Africa).

I'd like to see these figures compensated for population numbers. There's probably 7 million people in my "Sydney" footprint, I'd bet there's 10+ million in the SF/Bay Area footprint, and probably 30million in that "London and the entire south of the UK" footprint.

[realdense]

I live in Brisbane, Australia, the third most populous city. I can confirm that there are areas in Brisbane (not even "Greater Brisbane") that barely have mobile phone reception, such as Burbank on the eastern side.

[meetups323]

I can do the same at the zoom level where Sydney has 137,000 base stations. Nowhere in Europe has 0 at that level.

[globular-toast]

Try the Scottish highlands. I think one of the differences is with Europe most of it is habitable, but North America has loads of desert and mountains etc.