Even before its acquisition by BT, the UK’s largest mobile operator, EE, was taking some innovative approaches to solving the country’s issues of poor rural coverage. In response to government pressure, including the threat of mandatory roaming, the MNOs have been paying long-overdue attention to patchy coverage in remote areas, and as part of BT, EE’s efforts may also help to support universal broadband initiatives. Last year, EE worked with virtualized small cell start-up Parallel Wireless to bring mobile broadband affordably to a series of villages. Now it has announced another interesting take on the issue, working with RF firm Lime Micro and Linux company Canonical on an open source programmable ‘network in a box’ project. This follows a rising…