4 What exists on paper, and where to look yourself

4.1 The shelf you can go and open

Seven documents are worth knowing by number before anything else.

TS 38.108 — the satellite base station's radio. What the equipment in orbit and its ground station have to transmit and receive, for the 5G radio and for narrowband internet-of-things use in the same band ^[1]. It is named by 465 documents here, 387 of them change requests TS 38.108.

TS 38.181 — the tests that prove it. The radio test methods and pass marks for three kinds of satellite access node, and for narrowband internet-of-things operation in two of them ^[2]. 374 documents TS 38.181.

TS 38.101-5 — the phone's side of the same link. The smallest radio and performance behaviour a 5G device using satellite access has to manage ^[3]. 838 documents and 771 change requests, which makes it the second most worked-on document in the register TS 38.101-5.

TS 36.108 — the same job on the older radio. Its title says what it is: the satellite access node's radio transmission and reception for the older LTE radio, the one the sensors and trackers use. 176 documents TS 36.108.

TR 38.811 and TR 38.821 — the two studies underneath all of it. The first is the study on the 5G radio to support non-terrestrial networks, the second the study of solutions for it TR 38.811 TR 38.821.

TS 22.261 — what the system must do. The 5G service requirements, and where every item of SA1, the group that settles what a system owes its users, writes its result. 122 documents, 120 of them change requests TS 22.261.

To those, add TR 22.887, the newest requirements study, whose own scope opens on enhancements of the 5G system over satellite and names access across several orbits for several services first ^[4].

4.2 How much of 3GPP this touches

102 specifications are in this subject's register ^[5], out of 3599 specifications 3GPP lists as active altogether ^[6].

Those two answer different questions and must never be subtracted from one another. The first counts documents this work names or changes; the second counts the whole active catalogue. Side by side they show that this is a corner of 3GPP rather than the middle of it.

4.3 The honest half

Everything above is what the record holds. The register keeps its own list of what it does not, written by the code that went looking and found nothing.

• No date on which any release froze, no date a study ended and no date a specification was published. There are meeting codes, version numbers, days planned in the work plan, and the day a file went up on 3GPP's server — and that upload day is not a publication day TS 38.101-5.

• No person is named. The work plan rows and the work item papers do carry the name of whoever holds the pen. None of it was copied in, so no chapter here can say who wrote what.

• No vote of any kind. Nothing in these stores records a tally, so no vote can be claimed for anything here.

• No reason for any decision. A document has an outcome word beside it — approved, agreed, revised, noted — and nothing about the argument that produced it RP-171450.

• No status word for a piece of work. The work plan row carries planned days and a completion value between 0 and 1, and no field saying running, stopped or finished. 116 of the short names stand at a completion value of 1 ^[7], which says the plan for that row is complete and nothing more.

• The counts are floors, never totals. 6568 documents name satellites or non-terrestrial networks in their title and carry no short name at all, so they sit outside every figure in this course ^[8]. A further 5663 say satellite or GNSS, belong to some other piece of work, and are equally invisible here ^[9].

• Two of the most important documents cannot be quoted here. The text of TR 38.811 and TR 38.821 was never parsed onto this machine, so this school can name them and count what was written about them and no more TR 38.821.

4.4 Where to read on

The two studies first, TR 38.811 and then TR 38.821, then TS 38.108 for what a satellite base station has to be. For the system rather than the radio, TS 22.261 and then TR 22.887 for what is still being argued about.

This school carries the text of none of them: it gives you the number, what the document is for, and the link.

The overview course of this track takes the same subject at a slower pace, and the in-depth course goes through it piece by piece.

4.5 What people get wrong