These figures, according to the GSA, demonstrate continued and significant growth since its last report in March, which recorded 253 announced devices, of which at least 67 were commercially available at that time.
‘‘In what is clearly a very challenging time globally with social distancing and fundamental changes to the way we work and live, connectivity has never been more critical,” commented Joe Barrett, President of GSA. “Around the world we are seeing mobile operators take unprecedented steps to support their subscribers and boost capacity, with 5G a vital part of their immediate and future strategies. As this data shows, we’re also seeing the vendor community working hard to bring devices to market even quicker to support the rollout and expansion of new 5G services, with smartphones accounting for over 85% of the new commercially available devices recorded this month.
“Based on vendors’ statements, we can expect more than 35 additional announced devices to become commercially available before the end of June 2020,” Barrett continued. “At GSA we’ll will be tracking and reporting regularly on these 5G device launch announcements for the industry as we continue to take the temperature of the 5G ecosystem.”
Part of the GSA Analyser for Mobile Broadband Devices (GAMBoD) database, the GSA’s 5G device tracking reports global device launches across the 5G ecosystem.
By mid-April 2020, GSA had identified:
- 16 announced form factors
- 81 vendors that had announced available or forthcoming 5G devices
- 283 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 95 that are commercially available.
GSA also tracks spectrum band support of 5G devices and has identified spectrum support information for just over three-quarters of all announced devices.
It found that 70% of all announced 5G devices are identified as supporting sub-6 GHz spectrum bands while 29.3% are understood to support mmWave spectrum. Just 22.6% 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 April the number of announced devices known to support band 78 has passed the 100 mark for the first time, reaching 103 devices.
The April 2020 5G Ecosystem Report containing summary statistics can be downloaded for free using the link below.
