Future communications systems will definitely be built on green infrastructures. To realize such a goal, recently a new network infrastructure named cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is proposed by China Mobile to enhance network coverage and save energy simultaneously. In C-RANs, to order to save more energy the radio front ends are separated from the colocated baseband units and distributively located in physical positions. C-RAN can be recognized as a variant of distributed antenna systems (DASs). In this paper we analyze the performance of C-RANS using random matrix theory. Due to the fact that the antennas are distributed geographically instead of being installed nearby, the variances of the entries in the considered channel matrix are different from each other. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the work on random matrices with elements having different variances is largely open, which is of great importance for DASs. In our work, some fundamental results on the eigenvalue distributions of the random matrices with different variances are derived first. Then based on these fundamental conclusions the outage probability of the considered DAS is derived. Finally, the accuracy of our analytical results is assessed by some numerical results.