Which Open RAN is best for you?

When you explore how to deploy Open RAN, one of the first things you want to find out is whether and how you can reduce your RAN costs. Because there are many ways to deploy Open RAN, the answer depends on how and where you plan to do it, and what your specific costs are.

To find the most cost-efficient way to deploy Open RAN in your network, you need to assess multiple factors. A crucial factor is the tradeoff between transport and location.

We developed a financial model that allows you to compare the Open RAN TCO for three scenarios that use different transport cost assumptions and show how transport costs may drive network topology decisions.

Key results

With Open RAN, operators with high transport costs can save 30% over 5 years, if they use a distributed topology with the distributed unit (DU) at the cell site, instead of a centralized topology with both the DU and centralized unit (CU) at remote locations.

Operators with low transport costs are better off with a centralized topology, and can save 30% over a distributed topology.