5 How a change request becomes published text

5.1 Nobody rewrites a specification

A published 3GPP specification is never reissued as a fresh draft. It is edited, one problem at a time, by documents that carry the replacement paragraphs and nothing else.

That document is a change request, written CR: one paper, one problem, one set of replacement paragraphs. It is the unit of work in CT1, and the volume says so.

Of 4235 documents in the last twelve months ^[1], 2835 were change requests ^[2].

Over the whole record the group has handled 71679 of them ^[3].

There is a second kind for documents that are not published yet. A pCR is a proposed change to a specification still being drafted; 563 arrived in the year ^[4], against 9772 over the whole record ^[5].

5.2 What one change request actually is

Take a real one. C1-262074 was brought to the meeting C1-161 by Nokia. It is a change request against 24.501 version 19.6.2, it carries the change-request number 7174, category F, it belongs to Rel-20 and to the work item 5GProtoc20-CT, and it was agreed C1-262074.

Its title says what it is for: "Corrections related to the handling of congestion and routing failure cases when receiving CIoT user data container" C1-262074.

Every field in that sentence does a job. The specification number and version say what is being edited and from which starting point. The change-request number is the identity of the edit itself, and survives across revisions. The work item says which piece of work is paying for it.

5.3 The trail through the document's own history

The best account of this process is not a description of it. It is §Annex F of TS 24.501, the change history, where every step the document has taken is one row of a table.

The columns are the whole story: date, meeting, document number, change-request number, revision, category, subject and new version §Annex F.

The first row is dated 2017-10 at meeting CT1#106, with the document number C1-174182 and the comment "Draft skeleton provided by the rapporteur", producing version 0.0.0 §Annex F.

The rows that follow are pCRs being folded in, one meeting at a time, with comments of the form "Implementing the following p-CRs agreed by CT1" followed by a list of document numbers. Between them sit rows marked "CT1 e-mail review", carrying editorial corrections §Annex F.

5.4 The moment it stops being a draft

Three rows in 2018 mark the change of status, and the version numbers are the tell:

Date	Meeting	Comment	New version
2018-03	CT#79	Version 1.0.0 created for presentation to TSG CT#79 for information.	1.0.0
2018-06	CT#80	Version 2.0.0 created for presentation to TSG CT#80 for approval.	2.0.0
2018-06	CT#80	Version 15.0.0 created after approval	15.0.0

The §Foreword explains why those digits look the way they do, and it is the one piece of 3GPP housekeeping worth memorising.

The same clause says the second digit is incremented for all changes of substance and the third for editorial changes only §Foreword. So a version numbered 20.0.0 is a document under change control with both of the lower digits still at zero.

The meetings those three rows name — CT#79 and CT#80 — belong to CT, which the register records as CT1's parent group CT1 — Mobility, call control, session management (WG1_mm-cc-sm_ex-CN1).

5.5 Life under change control

From version 15.0.0 onwards every row of the change history is a change request, and the table runs to more than four thousand rows §Annex F.

A recent row reads like this: 2026-06, CT#112, CP-261132, CR 7201, revision 2, category B, "Addition of UE Reader registration for AIoT Topology 2", new version 20.0.0.

Two details in that row are worth pointing at.

The revision number sits in the column headed Rev, and change request 7201 carried a 2 there. Revision is also an outcome a meeting records: at C1-161, 259 documents came out revised ^[6] against 174 agreed ^[7].

The category letter sits in the column headed Cat, and F, B, A, C and D all appear in it §Annex F. TS 24.501 does not say what any of them stands for, and neither does the register, so this course does not either.

The room the papers arrive in is How a CT1 meeting runs, in real numbers, and what the record of that room does not hold is Following the group yourself, and what the record cannot tell you.