Cheat sheet
CT1 — the group that writes what your phone says
3GPP CT WG1 in one morning
- Depth
- Overview
- Chapters
- 7
- Reading
- 40 min
- Questions
- 35
- Document
- TS 24.501 v20.0.0
- Sources cited
- 115
The shape of it
1 Where the group sits
- 1 The group that writes what your phone says
- 2 Architecture and protocol — what stage 2 and stage 3 mean
2 What it produces
3 How the work gets done
Keep these in your head
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1.1 The group that writes what your phone says
CT1 does not decide what a mobile network offers. It writes the exact conversation the phone and the core network hold in order to offer it.
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2.1 Architecture and protocol — what stage 2 and stage 3 mean
Stage 2 says what the system does. Stage 3 says what the two ends send. They are two jobs, not two quality levels, and neither replaces the other.
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3.5 What the group owns, and what it actually works on
229 documents, but six of them take most of the change traffic, and one of those six takes more than the next two together. Learn where the weight is before learning the list.
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4.2 Inside TS 24.501, the document at the centre
Clause 8 says what is in a message, clause 9 says how it is written down, and clause 10 says how long you wait. Three different questions, three different places to look.
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5.1 How a change request becomes published text
A CR edits a published document. A pCR edits a draft. The same author, the same meeting and the same argument can produce either, and which one it is tells you how far along the document behind it has got.
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6.1 How a CT1 meeting runs, in real numbers
A CT1 meeting is a five-day working week that ends with several hundred documents each carrying one word: what happened to it.
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7.1 Following the group yourself, and what the record cannot tell you
Start from the change history of the document you care about, not from the meeting. §Annex F takes you from a sentence to the change request that wrote it, and from there to the meeting — the other direction is a search through hundreds of papers.
Easy to get wrong
One from each chapter that has one. The course carries 8 in all.
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1.3 The group that writes what your phone says
"Non-access stratum" does not mean "no access". It means this part of the conversation is not the access network's business: the radio carries the message and does not read it.
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2.3 Architecture and protocol — what stage 2 and stage 3 mean
A newcomer reads "stage 2" and "stage 3" as steps in time, as though stage 2 were finished and handed over. They are not. Both documents are alive at once, and a change on one side usually needs a change on the other.
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3.2 What the group owns, and what it actually works on
Owning 229 documents is not the same as working on 229 documents. The change counts below are heavily lopsided, and anyone who reads the list as flat has the group's shape wrong.
- 4.5 Inside TS 24.501, the document at the centre
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5.5 How a change request becomes published text
"Agreed at CT1" and "published" are not the same event. The working group agrees a change request; the change history rows that carry CR numbers name a CT meeting and a CP- document, not the CT1 meeting the paper was agreed at. Between the two there is a step this record does not show.
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6.3 How a CT1 meeting runs, in real numbers
Those six do not add up to 617, and the gap is not a mystery to be solved with arithmetic. Two further outcome words appear in the data — "approved" and "endorsed" — and the register does not carry their counts. Subtracting to get them would invent a number.
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7.3 Following the group yourself, and what the record cannot tell you
The most common mistake is treating an outcome word as a judgement. "Noted" is not "rejected", "postponed" is not "refused", and neither the register nor the report says which it was. The word is what happened to the paper, not what the room thought of it.
The numbers, and where each came from
Every one was counted out of a file on this machine. Hover a row to read the question that produced it.
- 4 4 CT1 office holders have no end date on record
- 44 44 CT1 terms of office are on record
- 105699 105699 CT1 documents on record
- 2005-2026 CT1 documents on record run from 2005 to 2026
- 133 133 CT1 meetings have documents on record
- 4235 4235 CT1 documents in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 415 415 different organisations put a document to CT1 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 108 108 CT1 documents of kind 'LS out' uploaded on or after 2025-08-04
- 135 135 CT1 documents of kind 'LS in' uploaded on or after 2025-08-04
- 44 44 outgoing liaison statements to RAN2 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 19 19 outgoing liaison statements to SA2 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 39 39 incoming liaison statements from SA2 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 15 15 incoming liaison statements from RAN2 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 15623 15623 CT1 documents change 24.501 (Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) protocol for 5G System (5GS); Stage 3), over the whole record
- 237 237 specifications listed against CT1
- 229 229 active CT1 specifications
- 8 8 CT1 specifications no longer active
- 199 199 active CT1 technical specifications (TS)
- 30 30 active CT1 technical reports (TR)
- 175 175 active CT1 specifications in the 24 series
- 16 16 active CT1 specifications in the 23 series
- 149 149 active CT1 specifications have a Rel-18 version
- 154 154 active CT1 specifications have a Rel-19 version
- 31 31 active CT1 specifications have a Rel-20 version
- 5422 5422 CT1 documents change 24.301 (Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) protocol for Evolved Packet System (EPS); Stage 3), over the whole record
- 3413 3413 CT1 documents change 24.229 (IP multimedia call control protocol based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Session Description Protocol (SDP); Stage 3), over the whole record
- 2447 2447 CT1 documents change 23.122 (Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) functions related to Mobile Station (MS) in idle mode), over the whole record
- 2364 2364 CT1 documents change 24.379 (Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) call control; Protocol specification), over the whole record
- 2064 2064 CT1 documents change 24.554 (Proximity-services (ProSe) in 5G System (5GS) protocol aspects; Stage 3), over the whole record
- 499 499 CT1 documents change 24.301 (Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) protocol for Evolved Packet System (EPS); Stage 3), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 498 498 CT1 documents change 24.501 (Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) protocol for 5G System (5GS); Stage 3), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 430 430 CT1 documents change 24.369 (Ambient IoT Non-Access-Stratum (AIoT NAS) protocol for 5G System (5GS); Stage 3), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 165 165 CT1 documents change 24.860 (Study on NAS protocol for 6G System), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 162 162 CT1 documents change 24.554 (Proximity-services (ProSe) in 5G System (5GS) protocol aspects; Stage 3), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 144 144 CT1 documents change 23.122 (Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) functions related to Mobile Station (MS) in idle mode), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 143 143 CT1 documents change 24.543 (Data delivery management - Service Enabler Architecture Layer for Verticals (SEAL); Protocol Specification;), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 125 125 CT1 documents change 24.548 (Network Resource Management - Service Enabler Architecture Layer for Verticals (SEAL); Protocol specification), in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 219 219 named work items received CT1 documents in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 420 420 CT1 documents for the work item AmbientIoT-CT in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 200 200 CT1 documents for the work item TEI19 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 192 192 CT1 documents for the work item 5GSAT_Ph3_ARCH in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 172 172 CT1 documents for the work item MINT_Ph2 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 170 170 CT1 documents for the work item FS_6G_NAS_CT in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 142 142 CT1 documents for the work item 5G_ProSe_Ph3 in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 157 157 of 229 active CT1 specifications have parsed text on this machine
- 2835 2835 CT1 documents of kind 'CR' uploaded on or after 2025-08-04
- 71679 71679 CT1 documents of kind 'CR' over the whole record
- 563 563 CT1 documents of kind 'pCR' uploaded on or after 2025-08-04
- 9772 9772 CT1 documents of kind 'pCR' over the whole record
- 259 259 documents came out of C1-161 as 'revised'
- 174 174 documents were agreed at C1-161
- 184 184 CT1 meetings are listed, held and planned
- 172 172 CT1 meetings had started by 2026-08-04
- 2005-04-25 the earliest CT1 meeting on record started 2005-04-25
- 617 617 documents were put to C1-161
- 172 172 people are listed as taking part in C1-161
- 165 165 people are listed as taking part in C1-160
- 447 447 CT1 documents from Huawei, HiSilicon in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 338 338 CT1 documents from Ericsson in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 317 317 CT1 documents from Nokia in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 221 221 CT1 documents from Samsung in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 150 150 CT1 documents from CATT in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 126 126 CT1 documents from ZTE in the twelve months to 2026-08-04
- 70 70 documents came out of C1-161 as 'postponed'
- 53 53 documents came out of C1-161 as 'noted'
- 33 33 documents came out of C1-161 as 'merged'
- 19 19 documents came out of C1-161 as 'withdrawn'
- 9 9 new or revised work items were agreed at C1-161
- 5 5 new or revised work items were agreed at C1-160
- 69 69 documents are already filed under C1-162
- 7181 7181 CT1 documents carry no upload date
- 2026-07-31 10:40:59 the newest CT1 document on record was uploaded 2026-07-31 10:40:59, for meeting C1-162
The document's own words
One quotation per chapter that carries one, of 5.
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1.3 The group that writes what your phone says
The present document specifies the non-access stratum (NAS) procedures in the 5G system (5GS) used by the protocols for: mobility management between the user equipment (UE) and the access and mobility management function (AMF) for both 3GPP access and non-3GPP access; and session management between the user equipment (UE) and the session management function (SMF) for both 3GPP access and non-3GPP access.
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2.2 Architecture and protocol — what stage 2 and stage 3 mean
The non-access stratum (NAS) described in the present document forms the highest stratum of the control plane between the UE and the AMF (reference point "N1" see 3GPP TS 23.501 [8]) for both 3GPP and non-3GPP access. … Complete NAS transactions consist of specific sequences of elementary procedures. Examples of such specific sequences can be found in 3GPP TS 23.502 [9].
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4.3 Inside TS 24.501, the document at the centre
5GSM procedures can be performed only if a 5GMM context has been established between the UE and the AMF, and the secure exchange of NAS messages has been initiated by the AMF by use of the 5GMM procedures described in clause 5. Once the UE is successfully registered to a PLMN, a PDU session can be established.
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5.4 How a change request becomes published text
… x the first digit: 1 presented to TSG for information; 2 presented to TSG for approval; 3 or greater indicates TSG approved document under change control.
The words
7 the course explains, out of 201 the document defines — all of them.
- 5GMM
- 5GS Mobility Management
- 5GS
- 5G System
- 5GSM
- 5GS Session Management
- AIoT
- Ambient Internet of Things
- AMF
- Access and Mobility Management Function
- ProSe
- Proximity based Services
- SMF
- Session Management Function
Where to look it up
The 29 clauses of TS 24.501 this course is built from.
§Foreword§1§2§3.1§3.2§4.1§4.2§5§5.1.2§5.1.3.2.1§6§6.1.1§6.1.2§7§7.1§8§8.1§9§9.2§9.11.1§10§10.1§10.2§Annex A§A.1§Annex B§Annex C§Annex D§Annex F
The 43 named sources it cites, by what they are.
Meeting document 10
C1-262074C1-262440C1-262442C1-262554C1-262596C1-262597C1-262610C1-262611C1-262612C1-262617
Specification 10
TS 24.501TS 24.301TS 24.229TS 24.554TS 04.08TS 03.68TS 23.122TS 24.379TS 24.369TR 24.860
Meeting 9
C1-156C1-157C1-158C1-159C1-160C1-161C1-162C1-163C1-164
Page on the standards body's own site 7
The CT1 file area on the 3GPP serverThe CT1 mirror area on the 3GPP serverThe 3GPP specification status reportThe CT1 list of office holdersThe 3GPP work planCT1 documents on whatthespec.netThe 3GPP meeting calendar on whatthespec.net
Official 4
CT1 Chair: CHAPONNIERE, LenaCT1 Vice Chair: AGHILI, BehrouzCT1 Vice Chair: WON, Sung HwanCT1 Secretary: BIONDIC, Nevenka
Report 2
CT1 meeting report C1-161CT1 meeting report C1-160
Working group 1
CT1 — Mobility, call control, session management (WG1_mm-cc-sm_ex-CN1)
Where to go from here
- The same subject, quick start — Under an hour, four chapters, the shape of the thing.
- The same subject, in depth — The working reference: every mechanism, every parameter.
- Every question of this course — 35 of them, on one page.
- The final test — 15 questions, 70 per cent to pass.
- The whole of TS 24.501 — all 1340 clauses.
- Every source behind the course — 354 of them, each with its method.