About

whatthespec.net is a private webpage which is built with the intention to provide information about standards related issues in an accessible way.

The main goal of this site is to provide access to (mainly) 3GPP related material in a quick and simple way. The site should be understood as a tool that can be used by delegates to 3GPP meetings who often need to find specific documents or other type of information quickly.

Some examples of what you can do on this page:

• find 3GPP tdocs based on their (partial) title, number, type, etc;

• search 3GPP Work and Study Items as well as 3GPP Specifications;

• show calendar view of 3GPP meetings;

• find out who are and who were the officials (chairs, vicechairs, secretatries) of the 3GPP groups;

• get a list of the 3GPP dependencies on IETF drafts and RFCs and their current completion status;

• organize e-meeting times with respect to different timezones with help from a simple world clock;

• get most of the above data in json format by querying the APIs.

Disclaimer

whatthespec.net is not a professional service. The service might be at times unreachable, some of the provided information may be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. No responsbility is taken for the correctness or availabiltiy of the information which are provided by this service. No liability is assumed.

For reliable information about 3GPP documents please see the related sections on the 3GPP website and the 3GPP portal - all data made available on this page has been automatically aggregated from these sites.

whatthespec.net and its services is provided free of charge, advertisment, cookies and any form of tracking. For statistical purposes the IP address of all incoming requests are logged only locally, besides that no user specific data is stored. Specifically whatthespec.net doesn't create, store or transfer any user data or user profiles. No user or usage data is given to third parties in any way or form.

API Usage

Here are some simple examples of how the API can be used. Most of the data made available on this website can also be accessed via the API and then be processed by other applications, e.g. some self-written command line tools. The naming of the API fields can be determined by e.g. looking into the URI parameteres of the individual pages.

• The following example uses the linux command line utility curl to return a list of json entries for all "rel-16" "CR-pack"s where the tdoc-name starts with "SP-22", the meeting number is "96":

  curl -sL "https://whatthespec.net/3gpp/tdoc.php?name=SP-22&type=CR+pack&rel-16&meeting=96&api=1"

• The following example requests the same data and uses the linux utility jq to extract the tdoc number of these CR-packs.

  curl -sL "https://whatthespec.net/3gpp/tdoc.php?name=SP-22&type=CR+pack&rel-16&meeting=96&api=1"|jq .[].name

• Same as the above, but searching for document titles and using sed:

  curl -sL "https://whatthespec.net/3gpp/tdoc.php?name=SP-22&type=CR+pack&rel-16&meeting=96&api=1"|sed 's/.*"title":"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/'

• All documents that contain "151170" in their number

  curl -sL "https://whatthespec.net/3gpp/tdoc.php?name=151170&api=1"

• Return all documents which were approved by SA6 in 2021.

  curl -sL "https://whatthespec.net/3gpp/tdoc.php?name=s6-21&status=approved&api=1"

• You can also directly go to the webpage by removing the "&api=1" tag and copy the below link into a browser.

  https://whatthespec.net/3gpp/tdoc.php?name=s6-21&status=approved

Known Issues

If you are accessing this page via a proxy (e.g. when in a VPN or a from behind a firewall) which blocks websockets, then the "3GPP Meetings" and "3GPP Officials" pages will not work correctly.

The API is currently undocumented. Some simple examples are given above.

Currently no mobile device specific interface adjustments are available.

Sorting of some of the output tables isn't working correctly.

Date/Time formats in some of the API output is not in a human readable format.

Tools and Technologies

The site is optimized for usage with Firefox.

The site makes use of php, python3, pandas, python-panel, openpyxl, jupyter notebook/lab, javascript, jq and a number of other technologies.

Currently the code which enables this service is not public. If you are interested in more details how this site works please feel free to contact me.

Contact

justadelegate@whatthespec.net

Please feel free to contact in case of continued problems, ideas for new functionality, general feedback or to just praise the service :). Please be aware that an answer might take some time and not all requests will be fulfilled.

Support

whatthespec.net is free of charge and currently no additional support is required.

If you think this site is useful and want to show some support, please consider to support one or more of the following organizations: moz://a, the free software foundation (fsf), the GNU project, 350.org, doctors without borders (msf), UNHCR.