Telecom carriers have barely finished rolling out their 5G networks, but they’re already talking about “5.5G.”

BARCELONA, Spain — Carriers haven’t finished rolling out 5G wireless mobile networks yet, but executives at major carriers are already talking about building out what they’re calling “5.5G” or “5G Advanced.”

At the Mobile World Congress tech trade show in Barcelona, ​​Spain, there was a lot of discussion about 5.5G.

MWC brought together thousands of people from the mobile industry, including major telecommunications companies. Deutsche Telekom, orangeTelefonica, BTand Vodafone.

At the expo, executives from these companies revealed they are working to roll out a new generation of mobile Internet.

This will enable even more sophisticated applications than the data-intensive apps we use today. FacebookInstagram, YouTube, Netflixand TikTok.

These apps are already well supported by today’s mobile internet, but 5.5G is expected to enable even more advanced applications in the future.

This also includes mixed reality headsets, which are becoming increasingly powerful thanks to tech giants such as: apple Apple Vision Pro is released. Meta Last year I upgraded to a Meta Quest Pro headset.

But it also means that some of the things 5G promised years ago, such as self-driving cars, driverless air taxis and smart manufacturing made possible by the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), will also start to become a reality.

5G is the next generation of mobile internet after 4G, promising superfast data speeds and wider coverage.

You may remember that a few years ago, mobile network operators were excited about the potential of 5G. Carriers in China, South Korea, the US and Europe began to roll out 5G networks in earnest in 2019.

Nearly five years later, 5G adoption among consumers remains low.

The number of consumers with 5G connections is growing, but it’s still well below “mainstream” levels.

5G is the fastest mobile generation to be rolled out to date, with the number of connections expected to exceed 1 billion by the end of 2022, growing to 1.6 billion by the end of 2023 and 5.5 billion by 2030.

However, 5G connections are expected to account for more than half (51%) of mobile connections by 2029, and are projected to grow by 56% by 2030. These figures are current as of January 2024, according to GSMAi.

In the telecommunications industry, 5G is being positioned not only as a consumer product that will enable faster download speeds, but also as the network that will underpin new technologies such as self-driving cars and driverless flying taxis.

This is because it has lower latency than 4G, meaning that it significantly reduces the time it takes for devices to communicate with each other, a key feature in scenarios where data needs to be delivered quickly.

But despite investing hundreds of billions of dollars in 5G networks, carriers have struggled to realize profits, and analysts say the real potential to monetize 5G may be just around the corner.

5G Advanced, or the name for the next stage of 5G, is the next evolution of mobile networks.

Communication networks require standards – globally accepted technical rules that define how technology works and its interoperability around the world. Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems to work together.

The development and finalization of these standards will take several years and involve many stakeholders, from companies to academic institutions to industry associations.

3GPP, the standards organization that helped make 5G possible, uses a parallel “release” system to give developers a platform to implement new features at a given point in time, then add more features in subsequent releases.

In the 3GPP release system, 5G is considered Release 17, which means 5.5G is referred to in the industry as “Release 18.”

Release 19 will effectively be 6G, another major upgrade for networks. Work on 6G standards is also underway, but is still in its early stages.

“Our key priorities in developing 5G Advanced standards are improving the commercial relevance of 5G through broadening vertical markets, resolving deployment challenges and continuing to evolve the technology to build a bridge to 6G,” Milind Kulkarni, vice president and head of InterDigital’s wireless research lab, told CNBC.

“Standards research has introduced, improved and perfected several new enterprise-specific capabilities for 5G Advanced, such as network slicing, private and public network integration, enhanced positioning, as well as applications specific to each enterprise vertical.”

Howard Watson, chief technology officer at British telecoms giant BT, said 5.5G will offer faster uplink speeds, making it possible to stream video, post online and play multiplayer games much faster than before.

“My children’s generation, dare I say my grandchildren’s generation… they’re going to be sharing a lot, and obviously sharing requires a lot of upstream,” Watson told CNBC on the sidelines of MWC. “We’re going to see a doubling of that upstream capacity in Release 18.”

An additional benefit of 5G Advanced over current 5G, according to telecom executives, is that the application of AI and machine learning will make the network itself more “intelligent,” improving performance and reducing overall power consumption.

GSMA Director General Mats Granryd told CNBC he expects the industry to remain focused on staying in the 5G environment for years to come, as there is still a lot of work to be done to monetize it.

“I hope we can stay in the 5G space for a long time because typically in a 4G environment, you and I were the consumers. It’s very quick for us because we just have to swap out our SIM cards,” Granryd told CNBC’s Karen Tso. “With 5G, 5G is primarily a business-to-business technology standard. It will take businesses a longer time to transition to and use the new technology.”

“The normal 10-year period between standards is, but is that enough? We expect to be able to stay in the 5G environment. It’s all fine for 5G to get so advanced that it becomes standalone, but we need to extend the time and go long enough to show the world that 5G is a great technology.”

5G Advanced will allow telecom companies to start making more profits by charging higher prices on 5G rollouts, and because 5G’s main focus is on enterprise applications, it could be much more profitable for network operators than it is for consumers.

Carriers have yet to disclose how much more expensive 5G Advanced data plans will be compared to 5G, but analysts expect carriers will try to capitalize on 5G Advanced by taking advantage of subscriptions and using AI and other technologies to run their networks more efficiently.

Because 5G’s primary focus is on enterprise applications, it has the potential to become a much bigger revenue generator for network operators than for consumers.

The telecommunications industry has been full of chatter about so-called “private 5G” networks — closed-off mobile networks that would be installed on-premise at corporate work sites for smart factories, remote surgery and other applications.

Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications equipment supplier, expects the official start of commercial deployment of 5G Advanced in 2024. For Huawei, 5.5G is a network capable of downlink speeds of 10Gbps. In case you didn’t know, that’s extremely fast.

Huawei last week announced eight 5.5G “innovation practices” that it says will help carriers build out 5.5G networks across all frequency bands. The company is working with carriers in the Middle East, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America to roll out 5.5G.

Getting consumers to move from 5G to 5G Advanced will take some convincing, given that consumers have seen few visible improvements since their phones were upgraded to 5G over the past five years. But Philip Song, chief marketing officer of Huawei’s Carrier Business Group, said it’s important for carriers to communicate the use cases for 5G Advanced to consumers.

“The most important thing for us is how we can support our customers,” he said in response to a question from CNBC during a press conference last Tuesday, saying the “greatest success” of 5.5G will only come if carriers “own the solution” and communicate it well to their customers.

Song said that while carriers are still working on rolling out 4G in some markets, he doesn’t think that’s an issue because different parts of the world are “at different stages.”

Watson told CNBC that he believes 5G Advanced will arrive on EE networks later this year, as 3GPP standard Release 18, or 5.5G, has already been opened for experimentation and operators are working on trials that are expected to be completed by June 2024, by which time the protocols that enable 5.5G should be stable.

“We expect Release 18 to start rolling out sometime this year,” Watson told CNBC, “and we also expect to launch 5G standalone sometime this year.”

5G Standalone is different from 5G Advanced. Sometimes called “true” 5G, it refers to the development of 5G networks that use 4G-independent technologies and unlock the full potential of 5G.

5G Advanced, on the other hand, is a complete evolution of the network.

However, there is no firm date for when the rollout of 5G Advanced will begin, as carriers are working hard to get it up and running.

“We hope that there will be enough bandwidth, latency and capacity,” GSMA Director General Mats Granryd told CNBC’s Karen Tso at MWC last week.

“That’s exactly what’s happening in Europe. In five years’ time, data usage will quadruple. I’m really worried about what’s going to happen at that stage.”

“Will there be roadblocks? Will there be congestion?” he added. “Will it get much, much worse, and will it look much worse? If it looks worse, Europe will become less competitive.”

—CNBC’s Arjun Karpal contributed to this report