The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is the global technical standards specifications initiative responsible for bringing together, producing and disseminating the Reports and Specifications that define 3GPP technologies, on behalf of seven national or regional telecommunications standard development organizations (ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TSDSI, TTA, TTC).

The 3GPP’s focus is on delivering a minimum specification baseline for globally applicable cellular telecommunications technologies, including radio access, core network and service capabilities, to provide a complete system description for mobile telecommunications.

The 3GPP specifications are structured in releases; 5G NR (New Radio) was first introduced in Release 15, with the 5G end to end to system in Release 16 and the current agreed work plan spans into Release 18 for 5G Advanced.

With regards to diversification, 3GPP has carried out work on the pros and cons of different logical and functional splits between network components.  

TIP was founded by Facebook (now Meta) as a community of telecoms network industry players to foster a collaborative ecosystem approach to accelerate the development and adoption of open, disaggregated, standards-based networks with an initial focus on developing for underserved markets.

The Joint Operators Technical Specifications (JOTS) forum publishes technical specifications that enable mobile operators and their vendor or neutral host partners to deploy common, shared radio network infrastructures. These shared radio networks are often found in stadiums, shopping centres, public transport settings and increasingly in office buildings.