Tracking the roll out of 5G, the August 2020 GSA report said the number of announced 5G devices has continued to climb quickly. In January 2020, the number of announced 5G devices exceeded 200 for the first time; by end-July 364 devices had been announced, of which 162 were understood to be commercially available (up from 135 at the end of June). By end-July 2020, GSA had identified:

• 18 announced form factors
• 91 vendors who had announced available or forthcoming 5G devices
• 364 announced devices
• including 162 that are understood to be commercially available:
   

Spectrum band support of 5G devices

GSA has identified some spectrum support information for just over 81% of all announced devices: 75.5% of all announced 5G devices are identified as supporting sub-6 GHz spectrum bands while 22.3% are understood to support mmWave spectrum. Just 16.8% of all announced devices are known to support both mmWave and sub-6 GHz spectrum bands. (The number of devices supporting mmWave spectrum bands has been restated, as a number of devices were initially announced as supporting both sub-6 GHz and mmWave spectrum bands, but have subsequently been launched – initially, at least – with only sub-6 GHz support.)

Only 31 of the commercially available devices (19.1% of them) are understood to support services operating in mmWave spectrum, but 87.0% 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, n77, n1 and n3. At the end of July, the number of announced devices known to support Bands n1 and n77 had passed the 100 mark for the first time, reaching 107 and 110 devices, respectively. Meanwhile the number of announced devices supporting Band 79 had reached 120, the number of announced devices supporting Band n41 had reached 152 and the number of announced devices supporting Band n78 had reached 176.

They expect the device ecosystem to continue to grow quickly and for more information about announced devices to become available as they reach the market. Based on vendors’ previous statements and recent rates of device release, we might expect to see the number of commercial devices approaching the 200 mark by the end of Q3 2020 (although many device launch timetables were announced before COVID-19 had an impact on businesses worldwide, so there is potential for the number of new launches to be lower than this). GSA will be tracking and reporting regularly on these 5G device launch announcements. Its GAMBoD database contains key details about device form factors, features and support for spectrum bands.