5G Devices April 2020: Global Ecosystem
Key facts
5G Devices April 2020. The number of announced 5G devices has continued to climb rapidly, accompanied this month by an equally rapid rise in the number of 5G devices that are commercially available. In January 2020, the number of announced 5G devices exceeded 200 for the first time; by mid-April over 280 devices had been announced, of which at least 95 are commercially available.
By mid-April 2020, GSA had identified:
- sixteen announced form factors (phones, head-mounted displays, hotspots, indoor CPE, outdoor CPE, laptops/notebooks, modules, snap-on dongles/adapters, industrial grade CPE/routers/gateways, drones, robots, tablets, TVs, a switch, modems and a vending machine).
- eighty-one vendors who had announced available or forthcoming 5G devices.
- two hundred and eighty-three 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
- one hundred and eight phones, (up 21 from mid-March), at least 64 of which are now commercially available (up 24 in a month). Includes three phones that are upgraded to offer 5G using an adapter.
- seventy-nine CPE devices (indoor, and outdoor, including two Verizon-spec compliant devices not meeting 3GPP 5G standards), at least 14 of which are now believed to be commercially available
- forty-seven modules
- nineteen hotspots (including regional variants), at least ten of which are now commercially available
- five laptops (notebooks)
- five industrial grade CPE/routers/gateways
- twenty other devices (including drones, head mounted displays, robots, snap-on dongles/adapters, a switch, tablets, TVs, USB terminals/dongles/modems, and a vending machine).
Not all devices are available immediately and specification details remain limited for some devices.
Spectrum band support of 5G devices
Availability of information about spectrum support is improving as a greater number of devices become commercially available. GSA has identified spectrum support information for just over three-quarters of all announced devices: 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.
Only 25 of the commercially available devices (26.3% of them) are known to support services operating in mmWave spectrum, but 84.2% of the commercially available devices are known to support sub-6 GHz spectrum.
The bands known to be most supported by all announced 5G devices are n78, n41, n79 and n77. At the time of writing in April, the number of announced devices known to support band 78 has passed the 100 mark for the first time, reaching 103 devices.
©2020 GSA
