The disclosed technology is directed towards load balancing baseband units in a communications network. A baseband physical layer 1 unit's functions are disaggregated into Layer 1 (L1) distributed units and radio units, instead of deploying full-fledged baseband units at a service′ provider's service areas (cells). A load balancer scales up the number of active distributed units based on increased actual demand, and scales down the active distributed units based on decreased demand. The L1 distributed units and radio units can be software-defined network functions, and need not be collocated, whereby the distributed units can be in the cloud or hub remotely located relative to the radio units deployed at the service areas. Examples of load balancing can be load balancing of transmitted data per carrier, per subcarrier, per user equipment, per transmission time interval (TTI/slot), per bearer, or per channel.