More 5G devices continue to be announced; in January 2020, the number of devices announced exceeded 200 for the first time and by end-May that figure had risen to 296 devices.
“Against the backdrop of an unprecedented disruption to normal life around the world, the growth in 5G has remained a constant feature,” commented Joe Barrett, President of Global mobile Suppliers Association. “Whether it is new 5G smartphones or CPE devices for 5G fixed wireless access, the industry continues to work hard to deliver the devices people and businesses need in order to benefit from the 5G capacity boost that the ‘new normal’ is demanding.
“Based on vendors’ previous statements, we might see more than 30 additional announced devices become commercially available before the end of June 2020. However, many device launch timetables were announced before COVID-19 had an impact on businesses worldwide and so GSA will be tracking and reporting regularly on these 5G device launch announcements as part of our ongoing work to help vendors, regulators and operators understand the true state of their industry.”
By end of May 2020, GSA had identified:
• 16 announced form factors
• 84 vendors that had announced available or forthcoming 5G devices
• 296 announced devices (including regional variants, and phones that can be upgraded using a separate adapter, but excluding prototypes not expected to be commercialised and operator-branded devices that are essentially rebadged versions of other phones), including at least 112 that are commercially available).
In terms of spectrum bands, 72% of all announced 5G devices have been identified as supporting sub-6 GHz spectrum bands while 28.4% are understood to support mmWave spectrum. Just 22% of all announced devices are known to support both mmWave and sub-6 GHz spectrum bands.
The bands known to be most supported by all announced 5G devices are n78, n41, n79 and n77. In May, the number of announced devices known to support band n41 passed the 100 mark for the first time, reaching 102 devices; the number of announced devices supporting band n78 had reached 118.
