A few weeks after Huawei showed off its latest networks roadmap under the banner ‘5.5G’, the 3GPP standards body has come up with its own, similar branding, ‘5G-Advanced’. This echoes the LTE-Advanced label that applied to later releases of the 4G standards, which were often seen as ‘true 4G’, since they delivered most of the full specifications originally set out by the ITU. Similarly, the first 5G release does not deliver the promises of the core ITU requirements, as laid down in IMT-2020, but as later releases increase functionality and capability, the networks will get closer to ‘true 5G’. The 5G-Advanced label will be applied to Release 18 and beyond. With Releases 15 and 16 already finished, and Release 17…