This is the tower side (RAN) not the phone side (UE). It's not clear who the audience is. I assume it's equipment vendors since running a real carrier on USRPs seems janky.
Use cases are partly captured by the list of customers across the bottom of the srsRAN home page (https://www.srsran.com/). It's great for any company/research group smaller than a multinational base station manufacturer, at which size the big players don't want to talk to you.
- Testing of various kinds. You can get deep inside an OSS base station, inspect and debug things, but likely may not even look at the proprietary innards of a commercial BS.
- Emergency connectivity when the backbone is broken, or did not exist. Most people would bring mobile phones anyway.
- Study / teaching, like MINIX OS or trainer aircraft which you can take apart and inspect.
- Maybe very small local cells to improve connectivity in difficult landscapes (mountains, skyscrapers, underground).
Something like this would've been useful in a couple remote networks that I worked on. Internet was easy to get with some ubiquiti wifi routers and antennae. Getting cell reception was a pain in the ass that involved setting up a repeater in the one spot of the valley where reception was kinda okay. I haven't looked into the project too much, but I imagine I could set it up to connect to a telcom tower and handle the wireless backhaul similarly to how I did the wifi.
Edit: An open implementation like this could lead to cheaper cells for large, concrete/metal buildings that typically have terrible reception.
I was wondering a bit whether that means Base Station or perhaps something else...