tion 6.2.2 Market Drivers 5G has been designed to support various use cases including high data rate and low latency services. In order to provide such services, the network has to be densified (e.g. to sup- port mmWave) and in many cases MEC needs to be deployed (e.g. to support extreme low latencies), as described in Chapter 4. Both network densification and MEC will require additional investments. However, based on the latest GSMA reports, the operator mobile revenues have been increasing by only 2% year-on-year with 1% growth all the way to 2025. For example, in India, the cost of 1 GB of data to a consumer in 2019 was $0.26 (source: http://cable.co.uk) and it has reduced by 48% year-on-year on average since 2014, lead- ing to a nine-fold increase in data consumption in the country. Furthermore, the cost of the spectrum has been around $0.02/MHz/pop/year in the developing countries, according to GSMA. For example, the 5G spectrum auction in India in June 2019 was priced at $7 billion/100 MHz. Relatively high spectrum fees encourage operators to use the spectrum more efficiently in order to control the deployment costs. Both factors increase pressure on operators to provide cost-efficient deployments for 5G. With RAN being the single largest contributor to mobile network CAPEX and OPEX, operators are looking for ways to reduce these costs and RAN virtualization is believed to be one of the key means to achieve that. In one total cost of ownership (TCO) model analysis (Mobile WorldLive 2018), the TCO shows a weighted total reduction of 37% deployment and operational costs over five years, derived from a 49% saving in CAPEX in the first year, and an annual 31% saving in OPEX over the full period. The CAPEX savings are mainly due to the virtualization of the Base- band Units (BBUs), which enables the use of lower-cost commercial off-the-shelf (CoTS) hardware and pooled resources. OPEX savings are from reduced maintenance routines and power and operations savings resulting from the usage of centralized data center