Understanding France's official antenna register (ANFR data)

Every French location on this site comes from one source: the national register of radio installations kept by the ANFR (Agence nationale des fréquences). Knowing how that register works helps you read the maps correctly, and understand their limits.

Who the ANFR is

The ANFR is the French public agency that manages the radio spectrum. Before a carrier can switch on a mobile antenna above 5 watts, the installation has to be declared to the ANFR and approved. The agency also checks that exposure limits are respected and publishes the list of installations as open data, under the Licence Ouverte 2.0, which allows reuse with attribution.

What a record contains

The register is organised around supports (a pylon, a rooftop, a water tower) and the emitters installed on them. For mobile networks, the open data gives one record per support, carrier and technology/band, with:

• the position of the support (coordinates, address and municipality);
• the carrier;
• the technology and band, for example "LTE 800" or "5G NR 3500";
• the antenna directions (azimuths) and heights;
• a status, such as in service, technically operational or approved but not yet built.

At our last import (September 2026) the register held 826,756 mobile records. We kept the 760,569 records with a status of "in service" or "technically operational", spread over 68,297 support positions. Records that are only approved, planned or decommissioned are left out, so the map shows equipment that is actually there.

How we turn records into pages

• Grouping by mast. Because each record is one carrier and one band, a single pylon can appear twenty times in the raw data. We group records at the same position so each mast appears once, with all its carriers and generations.
• Generations. Technologies are translated into 2G (GSM), 3G (UMTS), 4G (LTE) and 5G (NR).
• Directions. Azimuths become the sector lines you can show on the map, and our tables add the distance and compass direction from the centre of each town.
• Verified marker. On the map, a green ring marks positions from a regulator register like this one, as opposed to estimated positions from crowdsourced data.

The data sources page shows the date of the last refresh for each country.

What the data does not tell you

• Signal strength or speed. The register says where equipment is, not how well it performs at your address. For measured performance, see Arcep's "Mon réseau mobile" map.
• Very small installations. Equipment of 5 watts or less, such as some small cells and indoor systems, is not necessarily in the open data.
• Real-time state. A site in the register can be temporarily off for maintenance, and a new site can take some time to appear.
• Exact radiated power. The open data does not give the transmitted power of each antenna, so it can't be used to calculate coverage on its own.

Positions you can trust

Because positions come from declarations checked by a public agency, they are much more precise than crowdsourced estimates, which are calculated from where phones happened to be when they heard a cell. That is why our French pages can give a reliable distance and direction to each mast. In countries without such a register, positions are estimates and are shown with an uncertainty radius.

If you want the official view of a specific site, including exposure measurements carried out nearby, the ANFR's own map Cartoradio is the reference. Our guide on how to find the cell towers near you compares the different maps.