 exercise as investing in a low-latency and high-capacity network are both very significant. Hence, it is of utmost importance to know what should be supported in the network that is being built. Who is it being built for? Since 5G technology has been developed while keeping industrial automation and enterprises in mind, it is very important to know who the network is being built for. A macro network is most likely going to have enterprise, individual end subscribers, and IoT devices, all at the same time. Hence, it is important to know the distribution of each of these types of consumers. What number of subscribers need to be supported? This is key to understanding the scale of the network. The number of subscribers determines the radio units to be deployed in an area, the number of data centers and their size, and the type and quantity of servers, switches, and routers. In a nutshell, overbuilding a network would lead to larger expansion and lower usage of the network, hence the ROI would plummet. At the same time, underbuilding a network would lead to KPI drops and outages that would be detrimental to user experience. 5G Standalone Networks What volume of data needs to be supported? In addition to the number of subscribers that would connect to the network, it is also important to know what max throughput is expected per user and what total throughput is expected for a region. In addition to this, the traffic profile is also of great importance as it helps curate the network accordingly - for example, the percentage of UDP traffic versus TCP. The throughput will determine the capacity of the IP backhaul needed to connect the 5G core and radio components. It will also determine the number of servers allocated for a particular site for the control and user plane functions. Greater throughput per user will mean a larger number of computes dedicated to the user plane functions. What is the latency requirement? There needs to be a maximum tolerable latency number for each network, beyond which there would be packet