esides the scale of the product, we should consider the cost associated with the hardware and software development cycles. We consider three product development options: Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) based systems where the board is a "white box" hardware system that is commercially and readily available. In theory, hardware design can be eliminated from the development process, saving time and R&D cost (hardware headcount). The point of the COTS system is that it can be procured instantly, and therefore there are no risks and costs associated with hardware development. The cost is instead paid for in the deployment phase, the COTS hardware, is not optimized to the target use-case and hence costly in terms of financials, power consumption, form factor, or other aspects. Reference Design is based where the hardware is largely copied from a manufacturer or ODM provided 3rd party implementation and hence both low-effort and low risk in terms of potentially needing a re-spin of the hardware. In addition, board bring-up and Board Support Package (BSP) software components are largely available. We assume less than 3 months for any board customizations and/or the time required to procure the development systems. Bespoke and highly customized solution to the use-case. Components can be selected in mix-and-match fashion, but we need to accommodate for the time and effort spent on the system design. It is obvious that this approach is time consuming and potentially risky-hardware teams are often squeezed for time and headcount and don't have the engineering or procurement scale to make choices that 3rd party (reference design or COTS) systems have. But in a world where product differentiation and final product cost are important, bespoke hardware is obviously the most optimized path. Note that the concept of O-RAN is made to imply "software defined" and "COTS," but this is not actually the case: when we look at the O-RAN standards (fronthaul and other interface specifications, use-case definitions and others), they don't