The first specification from the O-RAN Alliance has been adopted as a public standard by ETSI. The ‘O-RAN Fronthaul Control, User and Synchronizsation Plane Specification v7.02’ defines an open interface between the radio unit and baseband, and will be labelled as ETSI TS 103 859. In particular, it specifies the control plane, user plane and synchronization plane protocols used over the fronthaul interface, linking the O-DU (O-RAN distributed unit) and the O-RU (O-RAN radio unit) when implementing the lower layer functional splits (for O-RAN, mainly the 3GPP’s Split 7.2, which implements some, though not all, the Layer 1 network functions on the virtualized DU rather than the physical RU). Although open initiatives can be a valuable way to encourage rapid…