The IEEE has begun work on a standard which will be critical to the mainstream adoption of Cloud-RAN and other architectures which deconstruct the base station. To date, most fronthaul links between centralized basebands and remote radio/antennas have required the CPRI interface, which is implemented in proprietary ways by each OEM. Now the IEEE 1914 standard for the Next Generation Fronthaul Interface (NGFI) will replace CPRI and harness Ethernet, which should lower costs. NGFI will use Ethernet to handle quality of service, synchronization and data security in virtualized networks where baseband processing is carried out by virtual machines on carrier servers or in the cloud. The standard will coordinate multiple RF streams to support Massive MIMO and C-RAN at lower…