The number of announced 5G devices has continued to climb swiftly, with 401 announced as of the end of August, according to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).
Of these 401 devices, 190 are commercially available today, including 138 phones.
The 5G device ecosystem includes 93 vendors, and so far, there are 18 form factors. Alongside phones, these include 100 customer premises equipment (CPE) devices, 64 modules, 23 hotspots, six laptops and six tablets, as well as drones, head-mounted displays, robots, snap-on dongles/adapters, a switch, TVs, USB terminals/dongles/modems, cameras, a vehicle on-board unit (OBU) and a vending machine.
COVID-19 impact
“While, perhaps inevitably, the global COVID-19 epidemic has had a major impact on national plans for the assignment of spectrum for mobile services, 5G device announcements and launches have continued apace,” said Joe Barrett, President, GSA.
“5G phones and Fixed Wireless Access CPE still dominate, with the number of announced devices in each of these categories growing strongly during 2020. In fact, the number of announced 5G phones has more than doubled since the end of March 2020, while the number of announced FWA CPE is up by almost 50% in the same period. It is clear that regulators need to make spectrum available, since the mobile ecosystem is primed and ready to put 5G into people’s hands.”
GSA has identified some spectrum support information for almost 83% of all announced devices. For the first time, the number of announced devices identified as supporting sub-6 GHz spectrum bands has exceeded 300, which is 77.3% of all announced 5G devices.
Ove a fifth (21.7%) are understood to support mmWave spectrum, while just 16.2% of all announced devices are known to support both mmWave and sub-6 GHz spectrum bands.