 3GPP-based. 2.9 Role of Standards Release Rel-4 Rel-5 Rel-6 Rel-7 Rel-8 Rel-9 Rel-10 Rel-11 Rel-12 Rel-13 Rel-14 Rel-15 Rel-16 Rel-17 Total 10651 Total 10356 10980 10931 16274 13248 11252 11937 13624 10417 10980 11887 144754 Figure 2.13 Number of CRs per year. However, these days 3GPP is pretty much the only organization developing mobile broad- band standards. The positive effect of this is less market fragmentation, as the same tech- nology is deployed all over the world, which leads to lower development costs and better user experience (e.g. when traveling). However, there is also a negative effect, since lack of competition puts less pressure on 3GPP in general and 3GPP members in particular, contributing to the difficulty of reaching consensus. While 3GPP does the technical work of defining the 5G specifications, it becomes an official standard once it is formally adopted by a regional SDO (i.e. a 3GPP Organizational Partner). These are: ARIB: the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses, Japan ATIS: the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, US CCSA: China Communications Standards Association ETSI: the European Telecommunications Standards Institute TSDSI: Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India TTA: Telecommunications Technology Association, Korea TTC: Telecommunication Technology Committee, Japan. While 3GPP is arguable the most important group working on 5G specifications, there are a number of other relevant organizations and industry fora. Description of various SDOs is beyond the scope of this book, but to illustrate the abundance of organizations working on 5G and related technologies we provide the short list below: 2 Market Drivers LoRa Alliance ITU-T: International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector IETF: the Internet Engineering Task Force the O-RAN Alliance Small Cell Forum SAE International. While some of the organizations listed above develop standards that may in some cases be considered as competition (e.g. LoRa and 3GPP NB-Io