Technical Specification Group (TSG) GERAN had double cause for celebration last week, as the milestone of their 50th plenary meeting was crossed and its bi-annual leadership elections were completed.

The re-appointment of Andrew Howell as 3GPP GERAN Chairman, for his second term in this tenure, was by acclamation. Three GERAN Vice-Chairmen were also appointed without the need for a formal vote.

The new GERAN leadership will serve for slightly less than the full two years, as GERAN has decided to align with the other three Technical Specification Groups (CT, RAN and SA) – Scheduling the next elections for March 2013.

At its 51st plenary, 3GPP has kept on schedule to freeze Release 10, equipping LTE-Advanced with all of the required features for an ITU IMT-Advanced system.

This work ensures that LTE systems can evolve easily towards LTE-Advanced over the next 5-10 years with new capabilities, in both low and high mobility situations.

The headline grabbing requirement for IMT-Advanced systems is for peak download data rates of 100 Mbit/s on the move and 1 Gbit/s at stand still as LTE heralds the start of the 4G era.

The completion of the Release 10 Freeze at the Kansas City meeting (TSG#51, March 2011) means that no further functionality can be added to that Release.

This freeze allows Operators and Manufacturers to agree on the base set of features for any equipment for future networks.

Here are some of the Highlights from 3GPP CT#50 (December 2010):

Trend of CT CRs in the past meetings;

• The main concentration of the work is now in Release 10
• Rel-9 and Rel-8 are still substantial amount of TSG CT workload
• The first Rel-11 CRs were approved (EU-Alert)

The completion of 3GPP Release 9 was the story from the recent 3GPP Plenary meetings in Korea (TSG#48), but now the focus turns to the next Release schedules as progress towards always-on, always-broadband continues at pace.

In just over 12 months the publication of both Release 8 and Release 9 has given the ICT industry a smooth path towards the launch of Next Generation mobile networks – based on LTE for the future but compatible with legacy networks everywhere.

Elections have been held over the past two GERAN meetings. The full line-up of officials for the next two years is: