11 The work items that fill a CT1 year

11.1 What a work item is

Nothing in 3GPP is done informally. A work item is a named piece of work with a scope, an owner and a deadline, opened by a document called a WID — a work item description. A study item, opened by a SID, does the same for a question nobody has decided how to answer yet.

Every document filed to a working group says which work item it belongs to. That is what makes a year's activity countable: 219 named work items received at least one CT1 document in the twelve months to 2026-08-04 ^[1].

11.2 The six busiest

Work item	Documents in the year
AmbientIoT-CT	420 [2]
TEI19	200 [3]
5GSAT_Ph3_ARCH	192 [4]
MINT_Ph2	172 [5]
FS_6G_NAS_CT	170 [6]
5G_ProSe_Ph3	142 [7]

The names are exactly as the documents spell them, capital letters, underscores and all. The register holds them as strings, and holds no expansion of any of them.

Even so, the spelling itself is informative if you read only what is there. Three of the six carry a phase marker — _Ph3, _Ph2, _Ph3 again — which says the work is a continuation rather than a new subject. One begins FS_.

Two end in the letters CT, one with a hyphen and one with an underscore. And TEI19 carries a two-digit number where the others carry a phase.

Those six are the busiest of the 219 work items, and every other item shares what is left of the 4235 documents of the year ^[8] — which is worth holding on to: a list of the busiest items is a picture of where the pressure is, not a picture of what the group does.

11.3 How far a name can honestly be traced

Three of those six can be followed to real text without leaving the material, and the method is the same each time: match the words, then say plainly what was matched.

AmbientIoT-CT. The busiest item of the year, with 420 documents. CT1 owns TS 24.369, "Ambient IoT Non-Access-Stratum (AIoT NAS) protocol for 5G System (5GS); Stage 3" TS 24.369, and that specification took 430 change documents in the same year — third of all CT1 specifications ^[9]. And at C1-161 the group agreed a new work item description titled "New WID on CT aspects of Ambient power-enabled Internet of Things – Phase 2" C1-262440.

Three separate records, three matching strings. The register does not join them, but a reader can see the same subject in all three.

MINT_Ph2. Here the specification itself supplies the meaning, which the register cannot:

So there is a feature called MINT in TS 24.501, defined in the document's own words, and a work item whose name begins with the same four letters and took 172 documents in a year ^[5]. Those are two facts. Joining them is a reading, and a good one, but it is still a reading.

FS_6G_NAS_CT. 170 documents ^[6]. CT1 owns TR 24.860, "Study on NAS protocol for 6G System" TR 24.860, which took 165 change documents in the year ^[10]. At C1-161 the group also agreed a "New SID on miscellaneous functions and services for 6G System" C1-262610, and at C1-160 a document with the same title from different filers C1-261603.

A technical report at the top of a busy list is what the beginning of a generation looks like. The 6G work here is a study, not a protocol yet.

11.4 The two that stay opaque, and one that half opens

TEI19, second busiest with 200 documents ^[3], matches nothing in the register beyond itself. No specification title contains those letters and no agreed work item description at either of the last two meetings does either. The register carries the count and the string, and that is the whole of what is known here.

That is a real gap, and it has a fix rather than a shrug. Every work item name a document carries points at an entry in the 3GPP work plan, which is the list that gives each name a scope and an owner ^[11].

Two hundred documents a year is too much traffic to leave as an unexplained label, and the work plan is one page away.

5GSAT_Ph3_ARCH, third with 192 ^[4], half opens. TS 24.501 has a clause on NAS over a non-terrestrial network, whose first line says a 5GS can support 3GPP satellite radio access and that the clause describes the NAS-specific aspects of supporting it §4.23.1. And C1-161 agreed a "New WID on CT aspects for integration of satellite components in the 5G Phase 4" from CATT and vivo C1-262612.

5G_ProSe_Ph3, sixth with 142 ^[7], lines up with TS 24.554, "Proximity-services (ProSe) in 5G System (5GS) protocol aspects; Stage 3" TS 24.554, which took 162 change documents in the year ^[12]. C1-161 agreed a "New WID on CT aspects of ProSe Phase 4" from NIST C1-262442.

11.5 What the year looks like from the specification side

Set the work items aside and count change documents per specification instead, and the year gives a different but consistent picture What CT1 owns — 229 documents and the six that matter:

• TS 24.301 with 499 ^[13]

• TS 24.501 with 498 ^[14]

• TS 24.369 with 430 ^[9]

• TR 24.860 with 165 ^[10]

Two mature protocols neck and neck at the top, one young protocol close behind them, and a study of the next generation in fourth place. That is the shape of a group that maintains two generations while building a third.

11.6 How new work starts

Over the twelve months the group received 87 new work item descriptions ^[15] and 136 new study item descriptions ^[16], alongside 197 discussion papers ^[17].

Rather more studies were opened than work items, which fits a period in which a new generation is being examined and an old one is still being corrected.

What happens to those documents at the meeting itself is One CT1 meeting, by the numbers, and what happens to an agreed change afterwards is From a document number to a published version.