TTN Mapper - time to shut down?

jpmeijers
Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:45:13 +0000
TTN Network and Services

The TTN Mapper service is not yet being shut down. Currently the community feedback is being collected to work out a future proof alternative. A timeline will be communicated here once any final decisions have been made.

I registered the ttnmapper.org domain name on 16 March 2016. We can take this date as the birth date for the public coverage mapping effort. That’s almost 10 years ago now.

TTN Mapper served a few valuable purposes in the early years of The Things Nework.

It answered a fundamental question: do I have coverage in this location, or where should I expect to have coverage? This was important to know, as one would otherwise blindly try to get your first LoRa device going, without knowing if the reason is coverage, bad configuration, or a dead device.

It gave an instant way to see and feel how good the LoRa technology performs. By doing LoRdriving, many of us walked, cycled and drove up and down city streets, measuring the signal strength and range of the LoRa signal. We were amazed at the results, and kept on pushing for more: by increasing heights, and swapping out antennas.

I think these two key features of TTN Mapper is not required anymore. Gateway prices came down a lot, enabling everyone that wants to experiment with the technology to have a gateway, and therefore guaranteed coverage.

We have proven what the technology can do, and LoRdriving is not that interesting anymore.

The technology has turned more commercial, away from the hoobyists that played with it in 2016. Now, commercial entities run private networks, and a coverage map for a public network is not useful to them.

During these ten years I have personally paid for the cloud hosting part of TTN Mapper’s hosting. And the rest runs in my garage - adding additional hardware and electricity costs. Some people were kind enough to support the service via Patreon or other donations. I even tried adding ads to cover some of the costs. But in the end the service is still a large financial burden on me, and at some point that has to stop.

So, is it time to shut down TTN Mapper?
Please leave your comments, opinions or any ideas down below.

FAQ

Q: Will CoverageMap.net also be shut down?
A: Yes, coveragemap.net along with any private mapping instances host by me, will be shut down.

Q: Can someone else run it instead?
A: The code is open source on Github, so go ahead! My time is limited, but if someone is really serious, I might help get it up and running.

Q: Will the dataset be released?
A: No, unless we can figure out the inherent privacy issues with the data. It is GPS data with timestamps. This is inherently sensitive data, as people’s movements could be inferred from it. For this reason I can not open up the dataset. One could heavily anonymizes the data by stripping IDs and timestamps, but in the process most of its scientific value will be lost. It might be best to completely erase the dataset.

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