Special Report: Open RF front end Two organizations have published specifications to address one of the thorniest challenges in open networks, achieving a truly open RF front end (RFFE). Small Cell Forum’s new framework comes at the issue from the point of view of base stations while the Open RF Association is targeting a broad ecosystems of mobile devices. The Open RAN story is most convincing when it focuses on the upper layers of the 4G or 5G protocol stack, where network functions and processes can be deployed and orchestrated as microservices on a cloud-native platform, underpinned by COTS hardware. There are more challenges when the discussion moves to Layers 1 and 2 of the stack, which can be…