Generally, the green technology has been taken for granted in terms of providing clean and cheap energy without realising the costs. However, there are many trade-offs concurrent with enabling such technology. Accordingly, this paper evaluates and compares the green energy based networks with traditional counterparts. It presents a mathematical model which helps understand-ing the different variables that are necessary to advocate the green/renewable method over tra-ditional, or vice versa. This research shows that the cost efficiency (CE) of green networks can be relatively high, about twice the traditional, that is represented by cloud radio access network (C-RAN). Based on experimental data, this research shows that green technology requires more operational caring than traditional to produce same amount of power. With variant sites, cities, countries, geographical areas and equipment’s manufacturing characteristics, the model can pre-dict the total green systems’ trade-offs in the future. By doing so, the service providers, investors or network vendors are able to re-consider and decide the shifting between both types of networks