SCF celebrates major milestone publishing the 10^thedition of 5G FAPI - the industry's leading 5G RAN MAC/PHY interface

30^THJULY, 2025, UK, SCF (SMALL CELL FORUM), the global trade organization dedicated to driving sustainable digital transformation through agile, scalable, shared communications infrastructure, has announced the publication of the 10^thedition of 5G FAPI, the industry's leading 5G RAN MAC/PHY interface, demonstrating a long-standing commitment to advancing small cell and 5G technologies for an Open ecosystem.

Over the last 10 years more than 15 major global organizations have contributed to the specifications, from ‘pre-5G' to the current 5G FAPI suite, including more recently Qualcomm, RANSemi, Mavenir, Marvell, Meta, Radisys, Reliance Jio and BT.

We are delighted to celebrate this outstanding achievement," said SCF Chair, Prabhakar Chitrapu. "In the last few years, our 5G FAPI team has accelerated the pace of work on the FAPI specifications, releasing two updates per year to keep pace with the industry needs by adding new features to align with 3GPP standards. Now FAPI plays a crucial role in many of the small cell networks and architectures that the industry is implementing, including those based on O-RAN Open Fronthaul Split 7.2 specs and SCF's nFAPI, Split 6 specs. I would like to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate all those involved in developing this specification and sincerely believe that the industry will benefit from them."

Today the 5G FAPI suite comprises five papers:

• SCF222 PHY API Specification
• SCF223 P19 RF and Digital Frontend Control API
• SCF224 Network Monitor Mode API
• SCF225 5G nFAPI
• SCF229 FAPI Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) Protocol For Inline High-PHY

The specifications align with 3GPP releases and several Open RAN standards and efforts (including the O-RAN ALLIANCE and OAI etc). The ultimate goal of the FAPI suite is to lower barrier to entry and foster a diverse and open ecosystem, as demonstrated by support from leading Open RAN L2/L3 software providers.

The latest update to 5G FAPI PHY API v10, includes RedCap and coverage extension, supporting the latest industry-adopted 3GPP release features; support for network energy savings, compliant with Open Fronthaul; and support for hybrid beamforming, compliant with Open Fronthaul.

5G FAPI Group Lead, and Principal Staff Engineer at Qualcomm, Andrei Radulescu, said: "Today FAPI is used in millions of the world's system-on-a-chip small cells,in a diversity of deployments covering Sub-6 and mmWave, enterprise, public, residential, macro and small cell and much more. It really is a diverse interface supporting a range of implementations, from integrated small cells to advanced macro deployments, and from D-RAN to C-RAN and V-RAN. We in the SCF FAPI working group are delighted to have hit the milestone of the 10^thversion of 5G FAPI PHY API."

He added: "Our work is not slowing down, we have already started on version 11, and we have many more updates and additions in the roadmap for FAPI in 2025 and 2026."

To find out more, or download the specifications free visithttps://www.smallcellforum.org/technology/5g-fapi-standard/

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For press enquiries contact Claire Marshall / claire@smallcellforum.org