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You probably remember mobile operators raving about the promise of 5G several years ago. Now, they’re getting excited about a new upgrade: 5G Advanced.

Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BARCELONA, Spain — Telecom operators haven’t yet finished rolling out 5G wireless mobile networks. And yet bosses of major carriers are already talking about building something called “5.5G,” or “5G Advanced.”

There was a lot of chatter about 5.5G at the Mobile World Congress tech trade show in Barcelona, Spain.

MWC brought together thousands of people in the mobile industry, including from leading telecom companies like Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, BT, and Vodafone.

At the show, executives from some of these companies that they were working toward rolling out a new generation of mobile internet.

That would enable even more advanced applications than the data-intensive apps we’ve all come to use today, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok.

These apps are already well served by the current mobile internet, but in the future 5.5G is expected to power more advanced applications.

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That includes mixed reality headsets, which are getting more and more powerful with tech giants like Apple launching its Apple Vision Pro and Meta upgrading with its Meta Quest Pro headset last year.

But it also means some of the things that 5G promised us years ago, such as self-driving cars, unpiloted air taxis, and smart manufacturing enabled via the so-called internet of things (IoT), will start to become a reality, too.

What is 5G?

5G is the next generation of mobile internet after 4G, which promises superfast data speeds and better coverage.

You probably remember mobile network operators raving about the promise of 5G several years ago. Carriers in China, South Korea, the United States, and Europe, properly got underway with launches of 5G networks in 2019.

Now, nearly five years on, penetration of 5G among consumers remains low.

The number of consumers with a 5G connection is increasing. But it’s still well below “mainstream” levels.

5G has been the fastest mobile generation rollout to date, surpassing 1 billion connections by the end of 2022, rising to 1.6 billion connections at the end of 2023 and 5.5 billion by 2030.

5G connections are expected to represent more than half (51%) of mobile connections by 2029, though, and that is forecast to then rise 56% by 2030. Those numbers are up to date as of January 2024, GSMAi said.

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5G has been positioned by the telecoms industry not just as a consumer product for faster download speeds, but as a network that could underpin new technologies like driverless cars or unpiloted air taxis.

That’s because it has lower latency than 4G. That means the time it takes for devices to talk to each other is significantly reduced, a feature important in scenarios where data needs to be delivered quickly.

However, after hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into 5G networks, carriers have struggled to see the return. Analysts say that the real potential to monetize 5G might be on the horizon.

What’s ‘5.5G,’ and why are telcos talking about it?

5G Advanced, or the name for the next stage of 5G, is the next evolution of mobile networks.

Telecommunications networks require standards. These are globally accepted technical rules that define how a technology works and its interoperability around the world — interoperability is the ability for two or more systems to work together.

These standards take several years to come up with and finalize and involve several players from companies to academics and industry bodies.

The standards-setting body 3GPP, which contributed to 5G, uses a system of parallel “releases” to provide developers with a platform to implement new features at a given point and then allow more functionality to come in further releases.

In the 3GPP releases system, 5G is considered release 17. That means 5.5G is dubbed “release 18” by the industry.

Release 19 is what will effectively be 6G, another major network upgrade. Work is also underway on 6G standards, but it’s still in the early stages.

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“Main priorities for developing 5G Advanced standards are to increase commercial relevance of 5G by expanding vertical markets, resolve deployment issues, and continue technology evolution to build a bridge towards 6G,” Milind Kulkarni, vice president and head of InterDigital’s wireless labs, told CNBC.

“Research in standards have introduced, improved, and finalized several new enterprise-specific features for 5G Advanced, including network slicing, the integration of private and public networks, enhanced positioning, and even applications specific to each enterprise vertical.”

Howard Watson, the chief technology officer of British telco giant BT, said that 5.5G will promise faster uplink speeds, meaning you’ll be able to stream video, post things online, and play multiplayer games, much faster than before.

“My children’s generation, or even dare I say it, my grandchild’s generation … that generation, they share a lot. And clearly, sharing requires quite a lot of upstream,” Watson told CNBC on the sidelines of MWC. “There will probably be a doubling of upstream capacities coming in release 18.”

Further benefits to 5G Advanced over current 5G, telco execs say, is that it will make the networks themselves more “intelligent” through the application of AI and machine learning, while also boosting performance and reducing overall power consumption.

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Mats Granryd, director general of the GSMA, told CNBC he hopes the industry can continue focusing on staying in a 5G environment for years to come, as there’s still plenty of work to be done on monetization.

“I hope that we can stay in 5G territory for long, because normally in the 4G environment, you and I were the consumers. And it’s quite quick for us to just say, change a SIM card,” Granryd told CNBC’s Karen Tso. “In 5G, 5G is a technology standard that is predominantly towards business to business. And it takes a longer time for businesses to convert and use new technology.”

“This normal of 10 years between standards, I wonder if that’s going to be enough,” Granryd added. “We hope that we can stay in a 5G environment. 5G advanced — 5G standalone, that’s absolutely fine. But push out the time and make sure that we have enough mileage to capitalize and monetize and show the world that 5G is a fantastic technology.”

With 5G Advanced, telecoms firms could start to make more money from their 5G rollouts by charging higher prices. And, with a key focus of 5G being enterprise applications, that could be a much more significant money maker for network operators than consumers.

Telcos haven’t yet revealed how much more a 5G Advanced data plan will cost compared with 5G. But analysts expect they’ll look to make money from 5G Advanced by getting clever about subscriptions and using AI and other technologies to operate their networks more efficiently.

With a key focus of 5G being enterprise applications, that could be a much more significant money maker for network operators than consumers.

The telco industry has been awash with talk about so-called “private 5G” networks, nonpublic mobile networks that are installed on-premise at companies’ work sites for example, in a smart factory, or remote surgery operation.

When will 5G Advanced be here?

Chinese telecommunications equipment supplier Huawei expects 2024 to be the year that commercial deployments of 5G Advanced officially begin. For Huawei, 5.5G is a network that will be capable of 10 Gbps downlink speeds — and in case you’re wondering, yes, that is very fast.

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Huawei revealed eight 5.5G “innovation practices” last week which it says will help operators build 5.5G networks across all frequency bands. The company is working with carriers in the Middle East, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America to deploy 5.5G.

It’s going to take some convincing for consumers to go from 5G to 5G Advanced, given the little noticeable improvement they’ve seen from their phones upgrading to 5G in the past five years. But Philip Song, Huawei’s chief marketing officer of the carrier business group, said that it’s important telcos convey the use cases of 5G Advanced to consumers well.

“The most important thing for us is how can we support the customers,” he said at a press briefing last Tuesday, in response to a CNBC question. The “biggest success” for 5.5G will only arrive if carriers “acknowledge solutions” and bring that across to customers sufficiently.

In some markets, operators are still working on deploying 4G, Song said — but he doesn’t think that matters because different parts of the world “are at different stages.”

Watson told CNBC that he thinks 5G Advanced will arrive on the EE network later this year. That’s because the 3GPP standard release 18, or 5.5G, is already open for experimentation and telcos have been working on trials. It is expected to conclude by June 2024, by which time the protocols that enable 5.5G should be stable.

“Release 18 we will start to roll out this year,” Watson told CNBC. “We also plan to launch 5G standalone this year as well.”

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5G standalone is different from 5G Advanced. Sometimes referred to as “true” 5G, it refers to the development of a 5G network that uses technology independent of 4G and comes with the promise of realizing 5G’s full potential.

5G Advanced, on the other hand, is a complete evolution of the network.

There’s no definitive date for when 5G Advanced will start to be rolled out, though. And telcos are on the clock to get it up and running.

“I hope that we will be at the bandwidth, the latency, the capability needs to be sufficient,” Mats Granryd, director general of the GSMA, told CNBC’s Karen Tso at MWC last week.

“That’s what we’re struggling with to see in Europe. In five years, we’re going to have a quadrupling of data usage. And I am really concerned about what’s going to happen at that stage.”

“Will we have cut-offs? Will we have congestions?” he added. “Will we have a much much worse situation, a much worse landscape? By having that worse landscape, the competitiveness of Europe will go down.”

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

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