A growing obsession with 6G among leading technology vendors will seem premature in countries such as India that are just embarking on their 5G roll-outs but the activities should be seen as a rallying call for emerging technologies that will boost performance and coverage further to satisfy ever more demanding use cases. 5G, like 4G before it, is evolving in stages defined by successive 3GPP releases. The first iteration of 5G New Radio (NR) was standardized in 3GPP Release 15, though this focused primarily on enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and was mainly deployed in Non-Standalone (NSA) mode, which still relies on the 4G core. But subsequent releases have enriched the capabilities (see separate item on Release 18), and Release 20…