Updated 26 July 2026. An earlier version of this article materially misdescribed the REACH project. It said the Buttermere emergency calls were carried on a private 5G network using cell-free massive MIMO; in fact the calls were carried on a low-cost 4G and 2G community network built by WaveMobile, the private 5G standalone network was in Blackpool, and the cell-free massive MIMO work was a laboratory testbed at the University of York. We are grateful to the reader who pointed this out, and we have rewritten the article against the project's published final report. We think the true story is better than the one we originally told.
In short: The REACH project brought mobile coverage to Buttermere, a Lake District valley with notorious not-spots, using low-power WaveMobile small cells with satellite backhaul. By March 2025 the network had seen around 250,000 connections and carried some 50 real 999 emergency calls that otherwise could not have been made. The same project built the UK's largest private 5G network along Blackpool Promenade, and advanced cell-free massive MIMO from simulation to a working laboratory testbed at the University of York.
Key Takeaways
- Around 50 real 999 calls from a notorious not-spot: not test calls but actual emergency calls from the public, carried by a basic 4G and 2G network built from small cells costing roughly £10,000 each
- The private 5G was in Blackpool, not Buttermere: 18 small cells installed on tramway masts and street furniture along the Promenade, creating the UK's largest private 5G network
- Cell-free massive MIMO stayed in the lab: the University of York built a world-first O-RAN testbed serving standard handsets, moving the technology from TRL 2-3 to TRL 4-5, but no cell-free equipment was deployed in Cumbria
In a nutshell
The Buttermere Problem
Buttermere is a valley in the western Lake District, surrounded by fells rising steeply on all sides: beautiful, remote, and popular with walkers and climbers who routinely venture into terrain where a slip or a weather change can become a medical emergency. The area is riddled with not-spots; as the REACH final report puts it, visitors "often wander into remote areas, and in the event that they require assistance, there is more often than not no mobile signal". When someone is injured here, getting help can mean walking until a bar of signal appears, or hoping someone notices you are overdue. We raise this not as an abstract policy concern but because it is a situation in which people can and do come to serious harm for want of a signal.
The REACH Consortium
REACH (RIC EnAbled Cell-Free mMIMO for High Density Demand) was an eighteen-month project funded under DSIT's Open Networks Ecosystem Competition, the same programme that funded our own £10 million ONE WORD project. REACH itself received a DSIT grant of £3.19 million, with partner contributions taking the total to £5.08 million. The University of York led the research, Cybermoor coordinated, and the consortium included WaveMobile, VMO2, Viavi Solutions, aql and SafeNetics, with Blackpool Council as a key local partner.
The project had three strands, and it is worth being precise about which happened where: (i) a private 5G standalone small-cell network in Blackpool, (ii) a basic coverage network for the Buttermere not-spots, and (iii) laboratory research on cell-free massive MIMO at York. Our original article collapsed these into one, which did a disservice to all three.
What Was Actually Built in Buttermere
WaveMobile installed low-power small cells at the Honister Slate Mine, the Bridge Hotel and Gatesgarth Farm, with backhaul over a Starlink satellite connection (fibre is following: BT reached the Honister site in early 2025, and the Fibrus Project Gigabit rollout will ultimately serve the valley). The service uses WaveMobile's GiLTE approach, a 3 MHz LTE carrier in the 1800 MHz guard band with a carve-out for GSM/GPRS: 2G for voice and telemetry, 4G for basic internet at up to 5 Mbps, dropping back to 2G when overloaded. Because it supports roaming, an ordinary phone on an ordinary contract simply finds the network. A single 5G cell was also installed at Gatesgarth, but the workhorse is the 4G and 2G service.
This is deliberately modest engineering, and that is the point. Between July and September 2024 alone, roughly 240,000 unique devices connected, most of them belonging to visitors. The trade-off is plain: nobody will stream 4K video from Gatesgarth Farm, but a walker on the fell can make a call, send a message, and be found.
Around Fifty Real Emergency Calls
By March 2025, the report records that around 50 999 calls had been made over the network, calls "which otherwise could not have been made putting lives at risk". These were not validation exercises; they were real calls from real people in difficulty, in a valley where no commercial operator serves. The network has also proved valuable in a quieter way: walkers who are late can now message friends and relatives, avoiding time-consuming and costly Mountain Rescue call-outs that begin when someone is merely overdue rather than injured.
Candidly, not everything in Cumbria worked. The planned collaboration with the Cockermouth Mountain Rescue Team did not materialise into a use case, which the project attributes to understandable resistance to changing radio procedures that rescuers trust with their lives. Resistance to change, the report notes, is a lesson learned.
Where the 5G Went: Blackpool
The private 5G network was built along Blackpool Promenade: 18 CellXica cells on a WaveMobile core, installed on tramway masts and street furniture, with the tramway installations done between midnight and 4am so the power could be isolated. This created the largest private 5G network in the UK, serving Blackpool Council, the tram operators and the Beach Patrol, with a further indoor deployment in the Winter Gardens. Here too the report is candid: configuration took far longer than installation, power interference from other sites degraded cell performance, and the consortium decided against a public trial at the August 2024 Airshow because the risk of underperforming in front of 300,000 visitors was too high. WaveMobile continues to operate the Blackpool network today.
Where the Science Went: York
The cell-free massive MIMO research was carried out at the University of York's Institute for Safe Autonomy, and it was carried out well: a full uplink 5G cell-free implementation across four base stations serving standard commercial handsets, which the project believes is a world first, built on an O-RAN architecture with a RAN Intelligent Controller. The work moved the technology from TRL 2-3 to TRL 4-5, generated two patent applications with more in preparation, and may yet spin out commercially. The AI-driven energy-saving xApps we described in the original article are also real, showing energy reductions of around 20%, though they were evaluated on a simulation model of the Blackpool network using Viavi's TeraVM AI-RSG test tool rather than on live rural sites.
The Real Lesson
Our original article dressed Buttermere in technology it did not have, and in doing so buried the more useful finding. The 999 calls were not carried by cell-free massive MIMO or private 5G; they were carried by well-sited small cells costing around £10,000 each, backhauled over satellite, run with community support, offering 2G voice and basic 4G. The report notes that mobile operators find the commercial case for such areas challenging, but that community-supported deployment has cut costs to the point where local stakeholders have agreed in principle to cover the running costs themselves.
That is a far more repeatable pattern than the one we originally described. If around 50 emergency calls can be carried from a Lake District valley for the price of a few small cells and a satellite dish, the argument that rural coverage is too hard looks considerably weaker, and we remain of the view that the remaining barriers are primarily commercial and regulatory rather than technical.
If you need to bring connectivity to a rural area with no existing coverage, get in touch. Read more about our rural deployments and the ONE WORD project on our about page.