Appendix E: Standardization Organizations and Industry Groups

There are many participants in the 3G development process. Various standardization organizations represent the technical, commercial, and political interests of their members. In addition to these organizations, there are special industry groups formed to promote the views of their members. The most important of these are briefly introduced in this appendix. This list is not exhaustive, and new industry groups are being set up all the time.

3GPP

(3G Partnership Project) (http://www.3gpp.org) is an organization that develops specifications for a 3G system based on the UTRA radio interface and on the enhanced GSM core network. In fact there are two IMT-2000 technologies being developed within 3GPP. IMT-DS (direct spread) technology is commonly known as the UTRA-FDD mode, and IMT-TC (time code) is the same as the UTRA-TDD mode. Furthermore, the UTRA-TDD mode includes two varieties: the wideband TDD mode and the narrowband TD-SCDMA. 3GPP's organizational partners include ETSI, ARIB, T1, TTA, TTC, and CWTS. It also has lots of other individual members, including market leaders in mobile telecommunications. Based on this strong backing, it seems to be quite certain that the standards to be developed by the 3GPP will be the most widely used 3G standards.

3GPP has also taken over the future GSM specification work from ETSI. This arrangement is rational, as the core network in both the 3GPP and GSM systems is the same. Any changes to the GSM specifications would have an effect on 3GPP standardization and vice versa. In...