15 How to follow TSG RAN yourself, from a cold start

15.1 What "following" actually means

Nobody reads TSG RAN. People follow one question through it: a band, a feature, a document, an argument. The skill is turning a vague statement — "they are working on that" — into a numbered document with a date and a status.

Every address you need is built from something you already have: a specification number, a meeting number, a document number or a group code. This chapter is the eight steps, in order.

15.2 S1. Fix the calendar

Work out which meeting your question belongs to before anything else. The quarter runs: working-group week, plenary three weeks later, an extra working-group week in between quarters. The detail is The meeting rhythm — plenary, working-group week and bis.

The next two plenaries on record are Madrid on 14 September 2026 3GPPRAN#113 and Boston on 7 December 2026 3GPPRAN#114. The last held was Singapore on 8 June 2026 3GPPRAN#112.

If your question is about a feature, it will be decided at a plenary. If it is about a mechanism, it is being argued in a working group in the week before.

15.3 S2. Pick the group

Use the number if you have one. 38.1xx is RAN4, 38.2xx RAN1, 38.3xx RAN2, 38.4xx RAN3, 38.5xx RAN5 — with the caveats in The specification families, and what a number tells you.

If you have no number, use the subject: what is sent is RAN1, what is said is RAN2, what is between boxes is RAN3, how well is RAN4, whether it passes is RAN5.

Each group has one folder of its own on the file server, linked from its entry here: RAN, RAN1, RAN2, RAN3, RAN4, RAN5 and RAN6.

15.4 S3. Open the meeting

A meeting has a page on the 3GPP portal, addressed by its meeting number ^[1]. That page is where the dates, the location and the state — held or planned — come from.

The meeting's document list is a separate address on the same portal, generated from the same meeting number ^[2]. That list is the thing to work from: it carries every document with its type, its source and its status.

15.5 S4. Read the four orienting documents

Whatever the question, start a plenary with the same four.

• The agenda, written by the chair — RP-260830 for RAN#112. It tells you what the meeting meant to do and under which agenda item your subject sits.

• The report of the previous meeting, written by the 3GPP secretariat — RP-260831, the draft report of RAN#111 tabled at RAN#112. It tells you what the room already knew.

• The status report of each group — RP-260832 for RAN1, RP-260834 for RAN2. These say where each group had got to.

• The decisions themselves — the work item descriptions, the study report drafts and the change request packs.

A working group meeting has the same first document one level down: R1-2603480 is the draft agenda of RAN1#125. And groups write their own minutes — R5-261705 is RAN5's.

15.6 S5. Filter by document type

A meeting list of 2800 documents 3GPPRAN4#119 is unreadable until you filter it. Filter on the type column, and know what each type means before you do.

Looking for	Filter on
what is being proposed as new work	WID new, SID new
what is being changed in a published document	CR, draftCR, CR pack
what a study currently says	draft TR, pCR
what another group asked or was told	LS out
where a piece of work stands	WI status report
the argument itself	discussion

The counts behind those types are in How a radio feature travels from a question to a rule. The one to be ready for is discussion: 257341 RAN documents carry that type ^[3], more than all the change requests together.

15.7 S6. Fetch the document

A single document is a zip file under its meeting's folder ^[4]: the group folder, then the meeting folder, then Docs, then the document number with .zip.

That means you can go straight from a number somebody quoted to the file, without the portal, as long as you know which meeting it belongs to. The document number's prefix gives you the group — RP- the plenary, R1- to R6- the working groups — and the meeting is in the document list.

15.8 S7. Go from a document to its specification

If a change request names a specification you do not know, three addresses settle it.

The information page — title, owning group, status — is www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/ plus the number without dots plus .htm ^[6].

The file folder, holding every published version, is www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/ plus the series folder plus the number ^[7].

The status report is the single page the whole catalogue is read from ^[8]. Go here when you need a total or a list rather than one document.

15.9 S8. Look up what this course will not tell you

Two questions come up constantly and have no answer here.

Who chairs the group. No person is named anywhere in this course. Each group's chair history is its own page, addressed by the group's code ^[9].

Why something was decided. A status is approved, revised, noted, withdrawn or not pursued and no more. The reasoning is in the meeting report and the discussion papers, which is why S4 and S5 exist.

The full list of what is missing, and why, is What the record does not tell you.

15.10 A worked path

15.11 The habits that make it sustainable

Follow a document, not a topic. Topics sprawl across groups; a document number has one owner and one change history.

Read the previous meeting's report first. It is the cheapest way to avoid re-reading an argument that already ended.

Note the status, not the title. "Revised" means the version you are holding was replaced in the room. "Not pursued" means it went nowhere. RP-261197 is a study proposal recorded exactly that way.

Write the meeting number down with the document number. A document number without its meeting is hard to fetch, because the file lives under the meeting folder.

15.12 Where this meets the rest of the course

The calendar in step S1 is The meeting rhythm — plenary, working-group week and bis. The numbering in step S2 is The specification families, and what a number tells you. The document types in step S5 are How a radio feature travels from a question to a rule.

And the limits you will hit in step S8 are What the record does not tell you.