The O-RAN Alliance claims to have addressed possibly the biggest barrier to at-scale adoption of Open RAN – its sub-optimal support for the Massive MIMO radios that are becoming key to many operators’ 5G capacity and coverage expansion plans. On June 20, the Alliance agreed to a new specification within its Open Fronthaul family, which organizes the RAN functions in a way that increases efficiency in processing the complex beamforming required by MIMO antenna arrays from 16T16R upwards. Significant compromise was required to achieve a spec that the Alliance could unite around. In fact, Next Generation Lower-Layer Split (NG LLS), as the new addition is called, has three implementation options, to accommodate different approaches proposed by Ericsson and Qualcomm respectively.…