GSA Counts 42 Operators Investing in 5G RedCap, With 14 Commercial Launches

The Global mobile Suppliers Association published its 5G RedCap industry update on 2 April 2026, reflecting status as of March. It counts 42 operators in 27 countries investing in RedCap, of which 14 have launched commercial services, 6 are planning them and one — Rogers Wireless and Fido in Canada — is actively deploying.

RedCap, standardised in 3GPP Release 17, is 5G with the parts an industrial sensor never needed taken out. Bandwidth, antenna count and processing requirements are reduced relative to full 5G, which cuts module cost, complexity and power draw while keeping the network behaviour — the scheduling, the licensed spectrum, the handover — that made cellular attractive in the first place. It is the profile that sits between LTE Cat 1/Cat 4 IoT and full 5G, and it exists because the gap between those two was where most industrial devices actually live.

Launches since September 2025 include Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom in Germany, SoftBank in Japan, M1 in Singapore, MasOrange in Spain and e& in the UAE. Earlier ones cover Optus in Australia, stc in Kuwait, Dito in the Philippines, T-Mobile and AT&T in the United States, and all three Chinese operators. Testing and trials are under way in Bahrain, Czechia, Finland, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

For anyone specifying a connected product, the useful reading is coverage rather than count. A RedCap device is only useful where a network supports it, so the question for a fleet deployed across several countries is which of them appear on this list and which are still in trials — and, for the ones that are not, whether the module's LTE fallback is good enough to ship on.