Webinar - 3GPP RAN Status

September 27, 2017 (update)

We have subscribed to a new way to disseminate news from 3GPP groups. The 3GPP Brighttalk channel  will host a series of personal presentations by the leadership and rapporteurs, on a topical event or feature.

The first webinar was live on September 25, 2017. Balazs Bertenyi presented a special version of his Chairman's status report on the RAN#77 meeing, held in Sapporo (September 11-14).

If you would like to view the webinar, please visit the 3GPP channel.

Working Group election results

August 30, 2017

Nine of our sixteen Working Groups held leadership elections, during their meetings last week. 

Our newly elected Chairs are Wanshi Chen (Qualcomm), elected Chair of 3GPP RAN WG1 and Susana Fernandez (Ericsson), who is the new CT WG3 Chairman. Both have vast experience in the groups and will surely hit the floor running.

The re-elected Chairmen were in CT6 - Heiko Kruse, RAN2 - Richard Burbidge, RAN5 - Jacob John and SA5 - Thomas Tovinger. 

Elections for several Vice-Chairmanships were also conducted, in eight of the groups. The full details of the candidates and the results can be found...here

The 3GPP technical leadership now looks like this (newly elected & re-elected in green): 

A fond farewell

August 23, 2017

By John Meredith, 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre Director

It is my task to bring some sad news to the ETSI and 3GPP community. François Courau, who was the TSG RAN Chairman for a record eight years between 2001 and 2009, passed away last week.

In addition to being a prominent leader in 3GPP, François was an active figure in ETSI Technical Committee SMG and also in the earlier work within the CEPT - as a part of the Groupe Spécial Mobile.

Mission Critical Services in 3GPP

June 20, 2017

By Yannick Lair and Georg Mayer

A platform for mission critical (MC) communications and MC Services has been a key priority of 3GPP in recent years and is expected to evolve into the future by taking more requirements, from different sectors of the global critical communications industry, on board.

This article provides an overview of what was achieved so far in the MC domain within 3GPP and also gives an outlook of what can be expected in the near future. We plan to create a more detailed paper on MC Services, which will summarize the use cases and functional aspects of Rel-13, Rel-14 and upcoming Rel-15, later this year.

Driven by the 3GPP release schedule, the mission critical related functionalities have been phased across them, each release encompassing a complete set of standards for equipment vendors and operators to phase their implementations and deployments, based on market demands.

Control and User Plane Separation of EPC nodes (CUPS)

July 03, 2017

By Peter Schmitt (Huawei), Bruno Landais (Nokia), Frank Yong Yang (Ericsson)

At the recent CT#76 meeting (June 2017), 3GPP has completed the Release 14 specification of CUPS – set to be a key core network feature for many operators.

CUPS stands for Control and User Plane Separation of EPC nodes and provides the architecture enhancements for the separation of functionality in the Evolved Packet Core’s SGW, PGW and TDF. This enables flexible network deployment and operation, by distributed or centralized deployment and the independent scaling between control plane and user plane functions - while not affecting the functionality of the existing nodes subject to this split.