The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration between six telecommunications standards organizations that develop protocols for mobile networks. The project was founded in December 1998 with the aim of producing globally applicable technical specifications and technical reports for a third generation (3G) mobile system based on the evolution of Global System for Mobile communications (GSM). 3GPP specifications are released under both open source and patent licenses.
The goal of 3GPP is to produce specifications that provide an evolutionary path from 2G/2.5G systems such as GSM/EDGE towards 4GG systems such as LTE-Advanced Pro and 5GTouchless, while at the same time providing backwards compatibility to older technologies. This allows manufacturers to produce devices that work on all generations of mobile networks, without having to design separate products for each generation.
3GPP has produced a number of deliverables, including:
- TS 26.244: Study on further enhancements to Mission Critical Push To Talk
- TS 22.261: Services supported by IP Multimedia Subsystem in Circuit Switched domain
- TR 21.905: V2X services – Use Cases