The Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii, this week, has seen several early 5G device announcements and demos, but also illustrated how crucial massive amounts of available spectrum will be for 5G services.

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Verizon announced Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.(Korea: SEC) 5G phones (two in AT&T's case) at the Summit. While there were demos of the Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) Motorola z3 with its 5G add-on module, and the Netgear Inc. (Nasdaq: NTGR) Nighthawk 5G, a.k.a. AT&T's 5G "Mobile Puck." (See Now AT&T Promises Samsung 5G Phone in Spring 2019, Too, Verizon Plans to Offer Samsung 5G Phone in H1 2019, Verizon's First 5G Mobile Device? It's a Snap! and AT&T Reveals First Commercial 5G Device.)

Although journalists reported that access to demos was somewhat limited.

On location, Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) told The Verge that it had deployed a 5G network in 100MHz of 39GHz millimeter wave spectrum. So downloads were running at 130 Mbit/s to 140 Mbit/s, according to Ericsson.In July, Ookla reported "mean download speed over mobile in the US increased 20.4%" between the first half of 2017 to the same period of 2018 to a range of 27.33 Mbit/s to 20.38 Mbit/s amongst major US operators. So these 5G tests are still considerably faster than 4G LTE now (assuming you even get close to those LTE speeds where you live!) but not near to the promised 5G millimeter gigabit speeds. (See For AT&T, 5G Is a City Kitty, Not a Residential Fat Pipe .)