alled) the DU and the RU. xRAN member- ship included AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, NTT Docomo, SK Telecom, Telstra, and Verizon which made it more operator-centric compared to C-RAN which was more vendor- centric. The group's focus has been on developing standards for interfaces between wireless network components targeting interoperability between those components-much like O-RAN does today. The xRAN Forum defined the use of NETCONF/YANG standards for con- figuring and managing RAN architecture as well as the first versions of what now are the O-RAN CUS plane standards. At Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018, xRAN and the O-RAN Alliance announced their merger ensuring adoption of the xRAN standards into O-RAN. Open vRAN, announced by Cisco in MWC 2018, was a virtualized RAN architecture using general-purpose compute for implementation of wireless standards, initially only supported by a single operator (Reliance Jio). The Open vRAN ecosystem has developed multiple suc- cessful demos and trials on 3GPP and O-RAN standards, trying to accelerate the adoption of these solutions and integration with remainder (wireline) network architecture. The Telecommunications Infrastructure Project (TIP) was founded by Facebook in 2016, supported by Deutsche Telekom, Intel, Nokia, and SK Telecom. TIP now has more than 500 members. When Vodafone joined TIP in 2017, it contributed its concept of a software- defined RAN and started the OpenRAN project. Target of OpenRAN is to disaggregate hardware and software and resulting from this to run wireless stacks on general-purpose hardware. TIP is less focused on standards development and more on use-case definition and hardware/software implementations. TIP and the O-RAN Alliance announced a liaison agreement at MWC 2020 to ensure their alignment in developing interoperable O-RAN solu- tions. This ensures sharing of information, referencing specifications, and conducting joint testing and integration efforts. Spectrum: enabling 5G Ultimately, spectrum is the enabler for wireless deployment