One of the key announcements which Telecom Infra Project (TIP) would have made at Mobile World Congress was of a common remote radio unit (RRU) which would connect via the O-RAN fronthaul interface, opening the way to multivendor RANs. One of the first and most urgent activities for groups pursuing open RAN architectures was the fronthaul interface between the radio unit and the digital portion of a virtualized network, whether central or distributed. The urgency came because the industry already had an agreed fronthaul interface, CPRI, but it was implemented in a proprietary way by each vendor, so that it was very difficult to mix and match radios and baseband units from different suppliers. That, in turn, threatened to compromise…