3 What exists on paper so far, and what does not

3.1 Three piles of documents

Fifty-three specifications are touched by this work. ^[1]

A document joins the 53 one of two ways: a work item description declares it impacted, or at least ten Ambient IoT documents name it. ^[1]

The 53 sort into three piles, and telling them apart is most of understanding what has actually been built.

• Written for this work. Fifteen documents that exist because of Ambient IoT, and whose catalogue titles say so. A TS, a technical specification, is the kind that tells you what to build.

• Reports. Eight of them, where the thinking was recorded. A TR, a technical report, studies a question and is then closed; nobody builds from one.

• Already existed and had to change. Ordinary 5G documents edited to let a battery-less device into a system that had never imagined one.

3.2 The documents written for this

Five of the new ones end in 369, and reading them in that order is reading the subject in order.

• TS 22.369 — what the system must do for battery-less devices. TS 22.369

• TS 23.369 — how the core network is put together to support them. This is the busiest document in the area, with 816 documents filed and 524 change requests. TS 23.369

• TS 24.369 — the signalling a device exchanges with the network, with 439 documents. TS 24.369

• TS 29.369 — the service that stores and serves device data. TS 29.369

• TS 33.369 — security for isolated private networks. TS 33.369

The radio side has its own new numbers: TS 38.291 for the bits on the air, TS 38.391 for the protocol just above them, and TS 38.191, TS 38.194 and TS 38.195 for what the radios must do and how they are tested. TS 38.291 TS 38.391 TS 38.191 TS 38.194 TS 38.195

3.3 The documents that had to change

The third pile is the bill for admitting a new kind of device. Three rows are heaviest.

TS 38.413, the protocol between the radio network and the core, took 77 change requests; TS 29.522, the interfaces the core exposes outwards, took 70; and TS 38.300, the overall description of the NR radio network, took 58. TS 38.413 TS 29.522 TS 38.300

Even the foundations moved. TS 23.003, which is about numbering and addressing, took 46 changes, and TS 23.501, the architecture of the 5G system itself, took 14. TS 23.003 TS 23.501

3.4 What has not happened yet

Nineteen of the 37 named pieces of work stand at 100 per cent complete. ^[2]

Those nineteen are the rows of the 3GPP Work Plan whose completion field reads 100 per cent. It is a claim about progress, and it is only as fresh as the last time somebody edited the row.

Three honest statements about the rest.

• The studies are nearly all done. Nine of the ten stand at 100 per cent. The exception is the phase 2 charging study, approved at plenary SP-112 and still at zero. FS_AmbientIoT_Ph2_CH SP-260656

• One piece of Rel-19 is clearly still running. Conformance testing started on 2025-12-12 and stands at 37 per cent, against a target of 2026-12-11. Ambient_IoT_Solutions_plus_CT1_SA3-ConTest

• Phase 2 is under way and not finished. Eleven items sit between 0 and 70 per cent, and the finish dates beside them are targets in a work plan, not outcomes anybody recorded. AmbientIoT_Ph2-ARC Ambient_IoT_Solutions_Ph2-Perf

3.5 Two documents nobody here can describe

Two specifications are named as affected by phase 2 work, and the specification catalogue on this machine holds no title, no owning group and no status for either: TS 29.568 and TS 33.340. 29.568 33.340

They are listed here because leaving them out would be worse than admitting the gap. What they are for is not something this course can say.

3.6 Where to read this yourself

The first document to open is TS 23.369, because most of the work landed there. TS 23.369

After it, TR 38.769 for why the radio looks the way it does, then TS 24.369 for what a device actually says. TR 38.769 TS 24.369

This school does not carry the text of any of the 53 documents. It tells you which number holds which subject and how much work went into it; the words are on 3gpp.org.