In short: The 5G ONE4HDD project built a portable "cell on wheels" with satellite backhaul that can be deployed at major events with 10,000 or more attendees. Combined with 5G Broadcast for multicast delivery, the system proved that alternative radio suppliers can match incumbent vendor performance — a critical supply chain diversification proof point for the UK telecoms industry.
Key Takeaways
- Portable 5G for temporary events is now proven — a self-contained cell on wheels with satellite backhaul can provide coverage at any outdoor location without fixed infrastructure
- 5G Broadcast enables efficient content delivery to large crowds — multicast delivery means one transmission serves thousands of devices simultaneously, unlike unicast where each device requires its own stream
- Alternative vendors match incumbent performance — the project demonstrated that non-traditional radio equipment suppliers deliver comparable results, supporting UK supply chain diversification goals
In a nutshell
The Problem with Event Connectivity
Major outdoor events — music festivals, agricultural shows, sporting events, public celebrations — routinely attract tens of thousands of people to locations with limited or no permanent mobile infrastructure. Networks that cope adequately with a village of 500 residents collapse under the load of 50,000 festival-goers all trying to share photos and stream video simultaneously, and anyone who has attended a large UK festival will recognise this experience immediately.
Mobile operators can deploy temporary base stations, but this is expensive, requires long lead times, and depends on fibre or microwave backhaul being available at the site. Many event locations have no backhaul infrastructure at all. Event organisers increasingly need connectivity not just for attendees but for their own operations — cashless payments, access control, CCTV, and emergency services coordination — which means that poor connectivity is not merely an attendee inconvenience but an operational risk.
What 5G ONE4HDD Built
The 5G ONE4HDD project, funded with £1.6 million through DSIT's Open Networks Ecosystem Competition, brought together DTG (the Digital TV Group), Ateme, VMO2, Imaginary Pictures, and the University of Surrey.
The consortium designed and built a portable cell on wheels — a self-contained 5G base station mounted on a towable trailer that can be driven to any location and made operational within hours. The critical innovation is the backhaul: rather than requiring a fibre connection or line-of-sight microwave link, the system uses satellite connectivity to reach the core network. Modern LEO and MEO satellite services have made satellite backhaul viable for mobile networks — latency is now low enough for most applications, and bandwidth has increased substantially. For a temporary deployment, satellite backhaul eliminates the single biggest barrier: the lack of fixed infrastructure. The cell on wheels is designed to serve events with 10,000 or more attendees.
5G Broadcast: Multicast for Crowds
The project also incorporated 5G Broadcast technology, which enables multicast content delivery to large numbers of devices simultaneously — and this is where the efficiency argument becomes particularly compelling. In a conventional mobile network, if 10,000 people at a festival want to watch the same live stream of the main stage, the network must deliver 10,000 individual unicast streams; this is enormously wasteful of radio resources and is fundamentally why event networks struggle.
5G Broadcast inverts this model. A single transmission from the base station can be received by every device in range simultaneously, much like traditional terrestrial television broadcasting. For live event coverage, instant replays, event wayfinding, and emergency announcements, multicast delivery is vastly more efficient.
Ateme's contribution focused on the content encoding and delivery infrastructure — ensuring that video quality, latency, and device compatibility meet the expectations of attendees accustomed to streaming services. The trade-off at the time of writing is that 5G Broadcast requires device support that is not yet universal, so the full benefit will only be realised as handset manufacturers adopt the standard more widely.
The Supply Chain Diversification Proof Point
Perhaps the most strategically significant outcome of 5G ONE4HDD is its demonstration that alternative radio equipment suppliers can match the performance of incumbent vendors, and we believe this deserves more attention than it has received.
The UK's telecoms supply chain diversification strategy — accelerated by the removal of Huawei equipment — depends on credible alternatives to established vendors. Open RAN creates the technical framework, but operators need confidence that equipment from smaller suppliers will perform reliably in real-world conditions, not merely in laboratory environments.
ONE4HDD provided exactly this evidence. By building a complete 5G system using non-incumbent radio equipment and demonstrating it under real event conditions, the consortium proved that supply chain diversification is a technical reality, not merely a policy aspiration. That is an important distinction, because policy without demonstrated capability tends to stall.
Practical Implications
A portable, satellite-backhauled cell on wheels has applications well beyond festivals — emergency response after natural disasters, military deployments, and temporary industrial operations all need high-capacity connectivity where no fixed infrastructure exists.
The £1.6 million project cost demonstrates that the capability is not prohibitively expensive. The technology is proven, the supply chain alternatives exist, and the satellite backhaul that makes true portability possible is commercially available. Ultimately, the question is no longer whether portable 5G is feasible, but how quickly the industry moves to deploy it at scale — and whether event organisers and emergency planners recognise that the option now exists.