The difference is quite large. The architecture for the 5g backend was made to allow for easy virtualization and scaling capacity up and down. Hence telcos don'

The difference is quite large. The architecture for the 5g backend was made to allow for easy virtualization and scaling capacity up and down. Hence telcos don't need to buy a very specific subscriber management box that is special made and needs to handle peak usage. Instead you can buy or rent commodity hardware, and usually run much less hardware because you can scale up as required. Check out the diagram in this article: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/5g-network-architecture/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/5g-network-architecture/ Note how little space is given to the cell towers.