It may be only a year since 5G really started to be rolled out at scale in many markets, but already the telecoms world – or at least its hype machine – is bored with plain old 5G. The R&D projects and even deployment commitments for 6G are piling up along with the political posturing from the leading hi-tech nations. Operators, particularly in the USA, are already labelling certain services ‘5G-plus’ or similarly inflated titles. Huawei made ‘5.5G’ the centerpiece of its global analyst summit, held last week (see below). But there is interesting reality beneath the hype. ‘5.5G’ may recall previous 4G attempts by vendors to persuade customers they were more advanced than their rivals, but these sometimes turn…