 Now, supporting network slicing not only requires the necessary software in the NFs but also a whole new level of investment in automating the slicing mechanism and implementing the slicing architecture. Hence, the service provider would also need to invest in slicing software (automation) in addition to the regular network function it needs to run a 5G network. What is the current capacity of the IP backhaul? All the data that is sent from the gNBs to the user plane function and the internet would need to go through some kind of IP backhaul. An increase in user traffic would need a larger capacity of that backhaul network. Hence, the mobile network operators would need to invest greatly in increasing the capacity of the network and also onboarding newer technologies such as segment routing and SD-WAN for intelligent and faster convergence of the network. What is the nature of the geographic area that needs to be covered? The geography and population distribution in a region determine the design of the data center. A thickly populated region would need more compute muscle than a thinly populated region. For example, if a country has north, south, least, and west zones and for some reason, the north zone has only one-fourth the population of the east zone, there is no use building a similarly sized data center in the north and east. A better design would be to concentrate the computer power in the east and keep the north region a lightweight one. What is the projected data usage and type of network data consumed for the particular geographic area? The type of data consumed is also very important. Various data profiles such as video streaming, voice/video, and file transfers have different requirements from the network. For example, while packets per second are high for video calls, the data size of each packet is small. However, for a file download, the size of each packet would be high and the packets per second would be low. The higher packets per second will demand a higher tax on the CPU, SO the number of CPU