At
the grassroots level, this confidence may be attributed to the careful science
of technology standards developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project
(3GPP). The standards work by 3GPP, the foundation of the world’s mobile
broadband infrastructure, is delivering international communications
technologies to the masses via the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)
family of technologies, which is interchangeably called the 3GPP family of
technologies as they are based on the evolution of standards developed for GSM,
Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), Universal Mobile
Telecommunication System (UMTS), High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), HSPA+, Long
Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced.
It
may be helpful to consider the historical development of the 3GPP UMTS
standards. Beginning with the inception of UMTS in 1995, UMTS was first
standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in
January 1998 in Release 99 (Rel-99). This first release of the Third Generation
(3G) specifications was essentially a consolidation of the underlying GSM
specifications and the development of the new Universal Terrestrial Radio
Access Network (UTRAN). The foundations were laid for future high-speed traffic
transfer in both circuit-switched and packet-switched modes. The first
commercial launch (Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access (FOMA), a derivation of UMTS)
was by Japan's NTT DoCoMo in 2001.
In April 2001, a
follow up release to Rel-99 was standardized in 3GPP, termed Release 4 (Rel-4),
which provided minor improvements of the UMTS transport, radio interface and
architecture.
This presentation (from 4gamericas.org) provides good insights into the 4G Mobile Broadband Evolution:
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