Number of announced 5G devices tops 900 -- report

The Global mobile Suppliers Association’s latest tracking shows 938 5G devices have been announced, including more than 600 commercially available. The majority are smartphones and CPEs.

By the end of July the number of 5G devices announced across all categories broke the 900 mark, standing at 938, according to the latest data published by the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA). This represents a 24% increase over three months ago. A total of 608 devices are commercially available, a 30% growth over the last three months.

Figure 1: Growth of 5G devices (announced and commercially available)

Source: 5G Devices: Executive Summary – August 2021, GSA

The majority of both the announced and commercially available devices are phones, 450 and 401 respectively. Following in second place is household indoor and outdoor CPEs for fixed wireless access (customer premise equipment, for example routers and modems). Other categories, or form factors as GSA calls them, that have sizeable number of devices include modules, enterprise routers and gateways, and mobile hotspots. More niche categories include robots, TVs, and a vending machine.

The momentum of 5G devices is strong, in both the vendor line-up and the products brought to the market. As the curves in the chart show, it is still in the acceleration phase. “A year ago there were 90 vendors who had announced 5G devices, today this ecosystem has grown to be over 140, across form factors that serve the consumer, business and industrial markets,” said Joe Barrett, GSA’s President.

Barrett said that, based on current trajectory he expected to see the 1,000 mark of announced devices be broken by the end of Q3 this year, and the number of commercially available products exceeding the thousand mark towards the end of Q2 2022. “Based on what we see in the LTE market, enterprise routers/CPE should have the biggest potential for growth,” Barrett told Telecoms.com. When it comes to upcoming trends in the 5G device market, Barrett believed we should see “increased capabilities to support all the different forms of carrier aggregation in NR (FDD + TDD, Sub6 + mmwave, increased numbers of carriers in the DL and UL), more support for release 16 and then 17 features, and VoNR.”

One fast growing trend both GSA’s report and Barrett highlighted in his response to our questions is the fast-growing support for 5G standalone (SA) mode. It may be surprising to note that over half of both all announced products and commercially available products already claimed to support 5G SA in sub-6 GHz bands.

The strong momentum of 5G devices especially 5G smartphones isn’t lost on the industry analysts. Earlier, Strategy Analytics, a research firm, predicted that this year will already see smartphones supporting 5G outsell those that do not support the latest radio technology.