As the clock ticks towards 5G Advanced, with code freezing of 3GPP Release 18 scheduled for March 2024, the GSMA has been trumpeting the benefits more loudly than ever, in the hope of drumming up more interest from operators. It has been joined in this campaign by the major infrastructure vendors, including Nokia and Ericsson, but none more so than Huawei, which has even tried to co-opt 5G Advanced as its own under the banner of ‘Net5.5G.’ That certainly resonates with the much greater enthusiasm for 5G Advanced among the big three Chinese operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, rather than most counterparts elsewhere. It comes on the back of widespread 5G core deployment for 5G Standalone (SA),…