Chapter 19: Professional
Technical Support and its
Evolution
Section 1: The Permanent Nucleus in the CEPT
Environment
Bernard Mallinder
1
During late 1985 the CEPT Groupe Spe
´
cial Mobile (GSM) decided that in the interest of
maintaining speed and quality in the development of the technical recommendations, a
central support function was required. The mandate for this unit was agreed in early 1986
and the ‘‘Permanent Nucleus’’ (PN) of the GSM was created. The approach and mandate of
the unit built on the successful experience that the CEPT had had in the rapid development of
specifications for both satellite and ISDN services. The unit was established in Paris during
the summer of 1986 and consisted of full-time technical managers and programme managers.
The PN had expert full-time resources from France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland,
Holland, Switzerland and the UK.
The initial tasks involved supporting the working group chairpersons, ensuring technical
consistency, documentation release control, consolidation of work-plans and reporting
progress to the plenary of GSM. Within a year the role of the PN extended to the creation
of the equipment specifications (11 Series) and the formulation of the network management
recommendations (12 Series). In addition, the PN was charged with the co-ordination of the
evaluation of the different candidate technologies for the radio interface. These tests were
undertaken by CNET in Paris and involved the evaluation of TDMA and CDMA offerings.
After the choice for TDMA with slow frequency hopping, GSM entered into a review of
the complexity of the complete system. Initial work undertaken by Televerket in Sweden
indicated that the layer 3 protocol on the air interface resulted in an extensive acquisition time
during the initial ‘‘turn-on’’ period. The ‘‘Complexity Review’’ commenced during late 1987
and continued until the spring of 1988. During this period all working groups contributed and
a number of review meetings were co-ordinated by the PN in Paris. The findings and

As the definition of the GSM system stabilised interest in the system began to develop.
Various conferences emerged as did requests for technical papers and workshops. Members
of the PN were invited to numerous technical presentations and discussions. The important
points which needed to be communicated were the progress of the technical work, innovative
services, interworking with ISDN and data networks, coverage techniques and the functional
architecture. Less technical areas were also addressed including specification methodology,
consistency management, release control and eventually system performance.
GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication452
Chapter 19: Professional
Technical Support and its
Evolution
Section 2: PT12 and PT SMG in the ETSI
Environment
Ansgar Bergmann
1
When, in 1989, ETSI was created, GSM became a technical committee of ETSI, and the
Permanent Nucleus (PN) was transformed to become ETSI Project Team 12 (PT12). Some
time later, at the end of 1991, the offices were moved from Paris to the ETSI premises in
Sophia Antipolis.
Between 1989 and 2000, PT12 and later PT SMG continued the work of the PN to perform
the project management for the Technical Committee GSM and later SMG, to maintain
overall aspects of the specifications such as quality, consistency and compatibility, to support
working parties of GSM/SMG and to perform specific tasks including specification work. In
this period, GSM grow up with breathtaking speed, in terms of users, of countries to introduce
GSM, of networks, of variety of services offered to the users and of applicable frequency
bands, and the GSM core network became the de facto standard platform to connect other
radio access technologies.
PT12 was financed from the ETSI funded work program, and there was additional specific
funding from the EC, from GSM MoU Group/Association (later GSM Association), and from
member companies. This additional funding was often related to specific tasks and deliver-

PT12-ES
3
, responsible for the test specifications for the mobile station and the base station
sub-system; in 1994, it was transformed into two SMG subcommittees, SMG7 (mobile
station testing) and SMG8 (BSS testing).
Free circulation of mobile stations was one of the essential goals of GSM. Mobile stations
had to work correctly and with good quality in any GSM network. This explains the impor-
tance of the mobile station type approval regime. PT12 took an essential role, in cooperation
with other groups including
†
Type Approval Advisory Board (TAAB) and its successor organisations;
†
GSM MoU;
†
ECTEL-TMS;
†
EU organisations such as TRAC and ACTE.
The interim type approval, then the full type approval was installed. Later, the transition to
the new legal scheme defined by the EC, the CTR/TBR regime, had–be managed, and with a
tremendous effort, GSM was the first–implement the CTR/TBR regime. See also Sections 14
and 17.2.
In 1990, GSM became responsible for standardizing DCS1800, at that time also known as
Personal Communication Networks (PCN). It was agreed to specify DCS 1800 as a version of
GSM in the 1800 band. In phase 1, there were delta specifications for DCS 1800, mainly
concerning adaptation of radio transmission parameters, but also necessary consequences of
the added frequency band for signalling, testing, the SIM card, cell selection and network
selection, and special requirements of the DCS 1800 operators for equipment sharing and
national roaming. The DCS 1800 activities were supported by experts working in an exten-
sion of PT12, funded by interested parties (the PCN operators).
19.2.2 Introduction of GSM Phase 2

phase 2 mobile station type approval, including the creation of phase 2 TBRs and the
translation of tests into the formal test description language TTCN.
19.2.3 The Evolution of GSM Phase 21
In 1995, the phase 2 specifications were frozen as version 4.x.y. The further evolution of
GSM took place as phase 21 (cf. Section 20), the basic concept being to add new features as
options. Depending on the completion date of specifications, features were assigned to yearly
releases R96, R97 and so on.
With a slightly increased number of experts, PT SMG started to provide support to all
SMG Sub-Technical Committees (STCs; the number had grown from 4 to 11; earlier, some
STCs did not have PT SMG support) and almost all working groups.
There was substantial discussion about the appropriate way to document the evolving GSM
system in the standard, and it was then decided to create a parallel new complete set of
specifications for each release.
PT SMG expanded the project management, a roadmap was created to reflect the progress
of each work item, and this roadmap was derived from a work item database maintained by
PT SMG. For bigger work items, work item managers were nominated and project descrip-
tion documents were created in the 10.xy series.
With the increase of participating companies, the introduction of electronic document
handling became more and more important. SMG started to provide all meeting documents
in electronic form and made them available on CD-ROM; step by step, the meetings went
from paper documents to electronically only distributed documents, and today all ETSI and
3GPP specifications and meeting documents are available on the Web (www.etsi.org and
www.3GPP.org), much work is done in e-mail discussion groups, and meetings use LANs for
the document handling.
Chapter 19: Professional Technical Support and its Evolution 455