Setting up a 5G base station is expensive, with costs ranging from $100,000 to $200,000 per site. This price includes hardware, installation, site rental, and maintenance. Urban areas often have higher costs due to land prices and infrastructure challenges.
5G is primarily being rolled-out by private companies called mobile network operators. These are EE, O2, Vodafone and Three. The first commercial networks went live in major UK cities in 2019. Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, estimated that in September 2023, 85 to 93% of UK premises could get 5G coverage outdoors from at least one operator.
At present, almost all 5G in the UK is delivered using non-standalone (NSA) technology. NSA 5G uses new 5G equipment for the Radio Access Network (RAN, which transmits wireless signals to user devices such as smart phones) but relies on 4G infrastructure for the 'core' network (which enables connectivity to the wider internet).
Oxford Economics (Worthington, 2019) pointed out that restricting a key supplier of 5G infrastructure from helping to build a country's network would increase that UK's 5G investment costs by between 8% and 29% over the next decade. 5G deployment is not only expensive for equipment, but also for spectrum resources.
However, due to the utilization of massive antennas and higher frequency bands, the energy consumption of 5G base stations (BSs) is much higher than that of 4G BSs, which incurs huge operation costs and significantly increases carbon emissions under traditional power supply mode .
Ye G. Research on reducing energy consumption cost of 5G Base Station based on photovoltaic energy storage system. In: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Computer Science, Electronic Information Engineering and Intelligent Control Technology (CEI), Fuzhou, China, 2021. p. 480-484.
Moreover, direct curtailment of surplus PV energy will encounter the PV power curtailment penalty. Therefore, 5G BSs are willing to engage in electricity trading with SES system through leased capacity to reduce operation costs.
The simulation results show that 700 MHz and 26 GHz will play an important role in 5G deployment in the UK, which allow base stations to meet short-term and long-term data traffic demands respectively.
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