Described are techniques for limiting bandwidth requirements for user equipment UE data sent on a front haul link between a remote radio head RRH and a baseband unit BBU. For a given UE a subset of a plurality of beams is selected based on received energies of the plurality of beams, and for the given UE only data from the selected subset of beams transmitting on a front haul link. Multiple techniques are detailed for how the subset is selected, including (when UE allocation information is available) averaged received beam energy, total received beam energy, maximum received beam energy and also (when UE allocation information is not available). For further bandwidth reduction a special data compression technique uses the received energies of each beam to select a minimum gain offset value after dividing the data into I and Q components.