A three-way showdown in 2023: 5G standalone, 5G-Advanced and 6G

6G marketing and promotion efforts were on the rise in 2022, but this comes against a backdrop of 5G scaling past 1 billion connections in the near term and 5G-Advanced’s arrival in the medium term. On its face, this is a straightforward narrative: today’s 5G will pave the way for 5G-Advanced in the coming years, giving way to 6G in 2030 and beyond. But this means that operators will be managing multiple existing technology generations while planning for and rolling out future ones.

It is well understood that running multiple network generations is a burden on operators. Add to that a future focus on diverse technology evolutions and the problem could be exponentially worse, even if some are still years away. While this might have been a theoretical concern in the past, it’s likely to come to the fore in 2023 as 5G standalone (SA), 5G-Advanced and 6G all clamour for attention.