Smartphone sales giving 5G deployments an unintended boost: Report

San Francisco: The global switch to 5G is well underway, with the number of connections to the next-generation network set to reach 1.34 billion in 2022, says a new report.

According to an analysis by market researcher CCS Insight, this year has seen connections to 5G triple to 637 million, suggesting that the roll-out of the network is continuing apace.

National lockdowns caused by the global health crisis in 2020 slowed network rollout, for example making it more difficult to send engineers on the ground to physically build the infrastructure, ZDNet reported.