Excellence Awards for 2015 work

February 29, 2016

The 3GPP Excellence Awards have been distributed, showing the appreciation of the technical leadership for outstanding individual effort in 2015.

3GPP RAN1 - Radio layer 1 – group kept up its outstanding record of gathering excellence awards through the work of Havish Koorapaty as Rapporteur for the Release 13 Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) feature.

The next award was – unusually – given for an effort across two working groups (GERAN 1 and 2). John Diachina received the award for his contributions in Release 13 work items on Extended Coverage GSM (EC-GSM) and extended Discontinues Reception (eDRX).

The newest of 3GPP Working Groups – SA6 - scooped up an award for its work on mission critical applications. Yannick Lair was the recipient, for his effort and drive to deliver the new Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MC-PTT) specification.

At the same time Ricky Kaura - CT1 - was rewarded with his Excellance Award, in recognition of his efforts to ensure that Stage-3 work on MC-PTT was completed in Release 13.

All roads lead to IoT, from GERAN to RAN

January 25, 2016

2016 will see the largest single adjustment to the 3GPP Technical Specifications Group structure since the creation of the project, with the closure of the GSM/EDGE RAN (GERAN) committee and the expansion of the RAN TSG structure to accommodate its current workload and the maintenance of specifications.

Although this can be seen as the closure of the legacy group, there is considerable interest in the reorganization, as the work started in GERAN on Extended Coverage EGPRS joins the other two M2M projects - LTE enhancements for MTC (LTE-MTC) and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) within 3GPP RAN.