Telcos are barely done rolling out 5G networks — and they’re already talking about ‘5.5G’

BARCELONA, Spain — Telecom operators haven’t yet finished rolling out 5G wireless mobile networks. And yet bosses of major carriers are already talking about building something called “5.5G,” or “5G Advanced.”

There was a lot of chatter about 5.5G at the Mobile World Congress tech trade show in Barcelona, Spain.

MWC brought together thousands of people in the mobile industry, including from leading telecom companies like Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, BT, and Vodafone.

At the show, executives from some of these companies that they were working toward rolling out a new generation of mobile internet.

That would enable even more advanced applications than the data-intensive apps we’ve all come to use today, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok.

These apps are already well served by the current mobile internet, but in the future 5.5G is expected to power more advanced applications.

That includes mixed reality headsets, which are getting more and more powerful with tech giants like Apple launching its Apple Vision Pro and Meta upgrading with its Meta Quest Pro headset last year.

But it also means some of the things that 5G promised us years ago, such as self-driving cars, unpiloted air taxis, and smart manufacturing enabled via the so-called internet of things (IoT), will start to become a reality, too.

5G is the next generation of mobile internet after 4G, which promises superfast data speeds and better coverage.

You probably remember mobile network operators raving about the promise of 5G several years ago. Carriers in China, South Korea, the United States, and Europe, properly got underway with launches of 5G networks in 2019.

Now, nearly five years on, penetration of 5G among consumers remains low.

The number of consumers with a 5G connection is…