Key facts:
The number of announced 5G devices continues to grow rapidly, this month exceeding the 700 mark for the first time to reach 703 announced 5G devices. This is more than 25% higher than the number of announced devices at the end of Q4 2020 and is an increase of 11.9% over the last month alone. Meanwhile, the number of 5G devices understood to be commercially available has risen by more than 28% over the last quarter, now standing at 431 commercial 5G devices, which represents 61.3% of all announced 5G devices.
By end-March 2021, GSA had identified:
twenty-two announced form factors.
one hundred and twenty-two vendors who had announced available or forthcoming 5G devices.
seven hundred and three announced devices (including regional variants, but excluding operator-branded devices that are essentially rebadged versions of other phones), including 431 that are understood to be commercially available:
three hundred and fifty-one phones (up 45 from February), at least 298 of which are now commercially available (up 24 in a month).
one hundred and thirty-two FWA CPE devices (indoor and outdoor), of which 50 are now commercially available.
ninety-one modules.
thirty-seven industrial/enterprise routers/gateways/modems.
thirty-six hotspots.
fourteen laptops (notebooks).
eight tablets.
thirty-four other devices (including drones, head-mounted displays, in-vehicle routers/modems/hotspots, robots, TVs, USB terminals/dongles/modems, cameras, femtocells/small cells, repeaters, vehicle OBUs, a snap-on dongle/adapter, a switch, a vending machine and an encoder).
Not all devices are available immediately and specification details remain limited for some devices. For this update, GSA has removed from its counts a number of devices announced to be in development in 2019 but which have not made it to market, as well as in some cases the companies announced as developing those devices. Numbers have been restated to reflect these changes.
We can 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 surpassing the 500 mark by the end of Q2 2021. 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. Summary statistics are released in this regular monthly publication.