How to get cell tower locations and WiFi sites locations

Does anybody know how to get the nearby cell tower locations and WiFi
sites locations? Is this information open and free to the public?

I think at least one company says that it operates an extensive global
almanac of cell tower locations and WiFi sites. So I guess this kind of
information is not privacy, but I am not sure if it is free (to download
or obtain).

Any thought will be highly appreciated.

(with clarity & insight):


I'm on the user end of this, working with cell sites all the time. But
I'm not on the aggregation or the database end.

Most cell sites in the US are owned & operated by MTOs (Major Tower
Operators) who own the land/compound & towers. They lease space on the
ground and on the towers to the carriers. A single tower can have
several carriers on it. And, as in the Chicago area, zoning deals (who
knows?) have created little tower farms where you can see clusters of
towers.

Anyway, the point of what I want to share is that you can get lots of
data of all this stuff, but every MTO uses different naming
conventions and so do all the carriers. Add the sheer quantity of
sites and the problem quickly turns into a naming mess. Then add all
the differing technologies each carrier operates. GIS is the only real
tool I know of to even try to get a handle on it all.

Some degree of this info might be available from the FCC. AGL magazine
carries ads for most of the database collections and MTOs.

http://www.agl-mag.com/

Isaac

http://f5bbutils.fairview5.com/signalloc/
For CDMA, this should be very accurate. For GSM, the cell site comes
off of a database that is often wrong.
Blackberry only.

For my AT&T BBerry, GSM, the database isn't "wrong", just misunderstood ;-).
It seems to put cell towers in the location of the cell phone, which over
time, averaged across GPS-equipped phones, should be pretty good.
Out in the sticks, it seems to be population centers, maybe skewed a little
toward highways.

Edge-30000-30-32641-48 is not in the middle of a lake, as far as I have
observed, but I can believe that is the geographic center of all reported
instances of connecting to that tower.

--
Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley Lake, CA, USA GPS: 38.8,-122.5