to be laid out is divided into five zones: north, south, east, west, and central. The central data center can host the management, orchestration, testing, analytics framework, and some control plane NFs. The regional data centers can host the user-plane functions and latency-sensitive control plane functions. Each regional data center can have a co-located redundant data center, which is most likely in an active-active configuration with 50% of traffic going to each one. If one of the regional data centers fails, the other one in the same zone can take over. Geo-redundancy can be planned across zones. For example, the north and west zones can be geo-redundant. Geo-redundancy helps when both data centers in a zone fail - for example, in the event of a natural disaster. In this case, the standby zone picks up the traffic. Also, note that for a geo-redundant pair, traffic should be sized SO that at any point in time there is, at 5G Standalone Networks most, 50% usage SO that in the event of a region failure, the standby zone can cater to not only its local traffic but also the traffic coming from the failed zone. The regional data centers feed in traffic from the edge data centers or the radio units. Radio access planning: Radio surveys and planning are an important aspect of laying out the base stations in the network. There is a significant impact on the placement of radio heads and the tilt of antennae. The terrain and obstacles are closely studied to select the most appropriate position to place a radio unit that has maximum coverage and minimum interference. IP core - backhaul design: The IP core design is another prime aspect of network design. With the advancement in radio and core technology and the explosion in data speeds, the total carrying capacity of the backhaul network had to also be expanded greatly and built to tolerate faults and outages. Note that a network will have a mix of legacy and new routers. This is why planning an architecture to enhance capacity and performance using both legacy and new 