 The issue of spectrum pricing or other models of spectrum allocations to operators (and other entities) is generally up to a local regulator and is beyond the scope of the book. Other important aspects of 5G RAN deployment include cost of RUs (or RRHs), cost of baseband unit (i.e. DUs and CUs), cost of transport network, which includes fronthaul, and real estate costs. Quite a number of NG-RAN standardization activities (described in Chapters 4 and 6) have been driven by the desire of operators to drive down NG-RAN CAPEX and OPEX. For example, there is the expectation that virtualization will help driving CAPEX down by decoupling hardware from software and allowing operators to source these from differ- ent vendors. Furthermore, virtualization may help driving down OPEX by allowing higher levels of automation in the network (see Section 6.5). While there are reasons to believe that virtualization does drive OPEX down, as was observed in for example, data centers, 7 NG-RAN Deployment Considerations one must remember that it also increases CAPEX, as virtualized implementation tends to consume more compute resources and more power than ones that run on custom hardware. The latter may eventually become negligible thanks to Moore's law; however, one must also remember that at least as of now it appears to be hard to fully virtualize radio hardware, therefore it may take time until operators are capable to fully realize virtualization gains. Additionally, opening up network interfaces by moving from proprietary Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI)-based fronthaul to more rigorously standardized interfaces defined for split architectures (see Sections 4.2 and 4.5) should spur competition in NG-RAN, poten- tially driving down costs by allowing true multi-vendor NG-RAN deployments. The caveat is that even fully standardizing network interfaces is not enough to achieve that goal, as non-negligible integration and interoperability testing effort still remain. In order to allow true competition between NG-RAN vendors, opera