3 Who is building it, and where the weight sits

3.1 How big the thing is

3GPP keeps a work plan: one row per named piece of work. The rule that picks this subject out of it selects 183 rows ^[1], carrying 155 different short names ^[2].

Those short names are written on 35306 meeting documents held on this machine ^[3], and 550 separate meetings have had at least one of them on the table ^[4].

Neither of the first two figures is a count of separate jobs. A feature, its core part, its performance part and its test part are four rows of the plan under four related short names, so the same piece of work is on the list more than once.

3.2 Eighteen group codes carry it

Eighteen group codes appear on these documents: five RAN working groups, six SA working groups, four CT working groups, and the three plenaries that sit above them. That is a wide spread for one subject, and it is what an area of work looks like rather than a single document.

The rungs are simple enough. SA groups settle what the system must do and how it is put together, CT groups write the exact messages, and RAN groups do the radio — with RAN5 testing devices at the end of the line.

3.3 Where the weight sits

Group	What it does here	Documents	Meetings
RAN4	the radio requirements and every band	7490 RAN4	34
RAN2	the protocol above the air interface	6714 RAN2	44
RAN1	the signals on the air	6492 RAN1	47
SA2	how the system is put together	3588 SA2	50
RAN5	testing devices for conformance	2455 RAN5	20
CT1	what a phone says to the network	2164 CT1	37

RAN4 is far in front, and the reason is visible in what it owns: the radio requirements documents, and a long run of work items that each add one frequency band. SA2 has the widest spread instead of the biggest pile — 50 separate meetings, more than any other group here.

Behind those six the pile drops away quickly. RAN3, which owns the interfaces between the radio network and the core, carries 1725 RAN3. Then SA5 on charging and management with 751 SA5, SA1 on what the system must do with 711 SA1, and SA3 on security with 551 SA3.

3.4 The plenaries open work rather than do it

Above the working groups sit three plenaries, one for RAN, one for SA and one for CT. The RAN plenary carries 1273 of these documents RAN, which is small beside the thousands below it — and that is the point of the place.

A plenary is where a study or a work item is proposed and approved. The paper that opened the first study of this whole subject was a plenary paper, as Why anyone wanted a phone to talk to orbit describes.

3.5 The busiest single meeting

Grouping every one of these documents by the meeting it went to, one meeting comes out on top: RAN4#116, with 555 of them ^[5].

It sat in Bengaluru from 2025-08-25 to 2025-08-29, and 633 people were registered for it R4-116.

Its neighbours are not far behind. The record holds 450 of these documents at RAN4#115 in Malta R4-115 and 405 at RAN4#117 in Dallas R4-117, so a few hundred a meeting is normal for that group.

That is the busiest of these meetings in the local record and nothing wider. It says nothing about how busy the meeting was overall, because every other subject on its agenda was counted out.

3.6 Who writes the documents

Every document carries the name of whoever sent it. Counting those names, two are far ahead of the rest: Huawei and HiSilicon together on 2287 ^[6], and Ericsson on 2184 ^[7].

Altogether 2664 different names appear as the writer of one of these documents ^[8] — a figure that says more about how names are written down than about how many organisations exist.

3.7 Where this meets the rest of the course

A base station in orbit is the vocabulary all these groups share. What exists on paper, and where to look yourself is what the work has produced on paper, and what these counts cannot tell anybody.

3.8 What people get wrong