5G Infrastructure Costs: What Telcos Are Paying | PatentPC
Setting up a 5G base station is expensive, with costs ranging from $100,000 to $200,000 per site. This price includes hardware, installation, site rental, and maintenance.
Setting up a 5G base station is expensive, with costs ranging from $100,000 to $200,000 per site. This price includes hardware, installation, site rental, and maintenance. Urban areas often have higher costs due to land prices and infrastructure challenges.
The power consumption of a single 5G station is 2.5 to 3.5 times higher than that of a single 4G station. The main factor behind this increase in 5G power consumption is the high power usage of the active antenna unit (AAU). Under a full workload, a single station uses nearly 3700W.
Although the absolute value of the power consumption of 5G base stations is increasing, their energy efficiency ratio is much lower than that of 4G stations. In other words, with the same power consumption, the network capacity of 5G will be as dozens of times larger than 4G, so the power consumption per bit is sharply reduced.
Estimates suggest that operating expenses (Opex) for 5G will be 30-50% higher than for 4G. This increase is due to higher energy consumption, increased site maintenance, and the complexity of managing a dense network of small cells and new frequency bands.
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