$285 buys you a decent 5G phone from Xiaomi in China. Sales are far higher than nearly anyone predicted a few months ago, probably ~200 million in 2020. China and Korea set the pace, with Europe and the U.S. far behind. 

Below, with details, my latest table of phones.

In China, many 5G phones are $470 and less. 9 companies are fighting for a market where only 4 or 5 can make a profit. China Mobile expects prices to fall below $200 by the end of 2020. Prices in the West are still $800-1500 but they also will come down. It only costs $1 to airfreight a phone. 

19 million 5G phones sold in 2019, almost all in China & Korea. China plans to sell 150 million in 2020, which will require ramping to over 15 million per month. Even before Corona, China was well behind that pace. If the coming huge stimulus emphasizes 5G, it may get back on track.

"You can't get a gigabit on 4G," claimed a senior staffer at a very respected organization. He is one of their experts on 5G. All the engineers know that 5G NR can't produce more than a minor performance boost - 20%-50% at best - at less than millimeter wave frequencies, less than 10% of 5G,

Actually, Gig LTE has been one of the biggest stories in telecom since 2017. Verizon demonstrated 1.45 gigabits in 2018. (Below) Qualcomm is now shipping the X24 modem, which can do over 2 gigabits. (Only Sprint has enough spectrum for that speed in the U.S.) (Also below, along with a Google News search fo Gig LTE). T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray thinks 5G NR will add 20% to 50% to capacity, but that's at best a while off. Because CA/DSS and LEE don't work yet in 5G, realworld 4G is often faster than 5G today. 

One of his bosses recently testified 5G would have 5 times the capacity. According to T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray and other engineers, 5G in low and mid-band can have 20-50% more capacity at some point in the future

4G since 2017 is shipping with advanced MIMO and 3 or 4 carrier aggregation (CA,) for "peak" speeds over a gigabit and real speeds over 100 megabits.

Korea's 5G net additions were only 313,000, down from over 800,000 in August, Phil Kendall of Strategy Analytics reports. Three months ago, the carriers were confident the pace would continue and that by the end of the year, the total would be over 5 million. In fact, the total was only 4.67 million due to the shortfall at the end of the year.

Phone subsidies have been cut sharply from the $400-600 earlier in the year. Deployment, at over 80%, is the highest in the world but the 90% target for yearend has been missed. The Korean press has been reporting reliability problems, even in Seoul.

5G, as the technical experts have been warning since 2018, is not coming close to the extraordinary hype.

Andy Sutton, Principal Network Architect at BT, sees millimeter-wave backhaul playing an important role in 5G networks. 90% of GSM networks used microwave for backhaul, but fiber became increasingly important in more recent systems. 

Sutton notes that E-band radios today can deliver 6 gigabits with 99.99% reliability. Recent regulatory changes will increase the spectrum available and data rates. That should be sufficient for most European 5G sites, which are primarily mid-band or low-band.

Verizon's Glenn Wellbrock, Director of Optical Transport Network Architecture, Design, and Planning, also sees an increasing role for wireless backhaul and fronthaul. Fiber is now 90% of Verizon's 5G backhaul, but he sees that microwave may double and backhaul 20% of sites.

Governments are being pressured to provide rule changes and cash for more fiber, because "fiber connectivity is essential."

In August 2019, I wrote Almost all 5G estimates for 2019-2020 need to be doubled. Figures for Korea and China were becoming available and were higher than expected. All the pundits were predicting fewer than 10 million phones in 2019. The numbers are now in. 

The 19 million figure is actually a little lower than I expected in October after the Chinese press reported 10 million reservations in October. It may be that people delayed actually buying phones until less expensive models, like the $285 Xiaomi, shipped in January. Alternately, some of the early announcements could have been inflated.

Korea was the first to deploy, pulling up Samsung's sales. As China started buying, Huawei pulled ahead. China is so large Huawei will soon be far ahead. Apple will come in in the fall, probably strong.

2020 estimates over 200 million were well supported but Corona could change that. 

Only one worker died falling from a wireless tower in 2012. That figure was up to eight in 2019. Many more were injured. Tower climbers are among the workers at the highest risk for fatal falls in the workplace. Workplace fatalities in the U.S are three times higher in the U.K.

The danger makes it hard to recruit new workers. DC believes the U.S. needs more trained workers for 5G success. The easiest way to make that happen is to enforce existing OSHA safety standards. Some simple steps: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, active in this topic, should meet with an OSHA counterpart and find ways for the FCC to help. I'd suggest

• Add to the FCC website a section on tower safety. OSHA can provide the information and the FCC could add links to training. Training options can easily be found at Wireless Estimator. A yearly press release with data could draw attention.
• Require all parties - telcos, towers, contractors - be responsible for safety. Too often, they just blame others.
• Making sharing networks and radios easier, which reduces the number of towers, cost, and time.

Telefonica CTO Enrique Blanco tells Harry Baldock,

All of the requirements they have today can be fully satisfied with 4.9G capabilities that we have in our network. This means that all the LTE-M and all the IoT requirements we currently have can be delivered using 4.9G. That's in terms of our customers' needs today. But, if you analyze what is going to happen over the next two or three years, in terms of delivering Industry 4.0 initiatives, those needs are going to evolve. We need to be ready. 

Blanco is among the half dozen most respected engineers in world telecom. He's been responsible for hundreds of millions of lines for Telefonica in Spain, England, Germany, and Brazil. He's been working on Edge networks and IoT for several years. He's right some new industrial uses will develop, but I expect limited impact. It's very expensive to retrofit a factory and relatively few new factories are being built. Even if the systems prove out, few factories are likely to be upgraded soon. Enrique is more optimistic and could be right. 

I've been horrified by the false claims about 5G from politicians, pundits, and especially the equipment vendors. At least for years, all large medical, public safety, IoT, and entertainment apps will run fine on any decent 5G LTE network. 5G is good stuff that adds important capacity. Consumers want it, especially as decent phones have fallen in price to $285-450. None of the "brave new world" uses will have much impact for years.

All the "studies" of economic returns from 5G are based on applications said to require 5G. Since most can be performed with 4G, these "studies," especially from Qualcomm, are not worth the electrons they come to us on.

Don't believe the hype.

In both November and December, ~5M 5G phones shipped in China. The monthly total is likely to go up quickly, as supplies of lower-priced phones are becoming widespread. In particular, the US$285 Xiaomi phone is now shipping. The December total phone sales were down 14% compared to Dec 2018, which may suggest people were waiting on the availability of less expensive 5G phones.

This is the official figure from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, CAICT. It is part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT.) There have recently been inconsistencies in reports from China. Ten million "reserved" 5G in the first two weeks of October; a senior technical company expert expected they would get phones within a month.

That schedule hasn't been met. The Chinese press reported some supply shortages. Some people may have delayed purchasing phones as announcements were made of lower prices soon to come. I may have misunderstood press reports, which I read in Google translation. Some numbers could have been exaggerated. 

China Mobile expects to sell ~100M 5G phones in 2020. China Telecom plans 60M. That's more than the official Chinese projection of a total of 150M in 2020, although China Unicom has not yet estimated publicly. I'll be watching closely to get accurate figures.