etail that is expected to be available from such a view? What is the duration such a view should ideally be meant to cover? Let's tackle the last question first. In most cases, a near view is about the now. What are the features present in the product (manifested by the technology) as of "now"? If the product is bought now or in the near future, what should be expected from the product? Those would be the expectations to be satisfied by a high fidelity near view. Most product sheets of available products should give the high fidelity view of the roadmap. In some cases, if there is no update planned to the product in terms of a new release, the near view could even be the current feature set supported by the product. As an example, let's look at the 3GPP technical roadmap planning for different releases starting from Rel 8-Introduction of LTE, as shown in Table 4-1 (http://www.3gpp.org/specifications/releases) CHAPTER 4 NETWORK ROADMAPS Table 4-1. 3GPP Roadmap Planning Release Spec Version Number Functional Freeze Date Rel-13 13.x.y March 2016 Rel-12 12.x.y September 2014 Rel-11 11.x.y June 2013 Rel-10 10.x.y June 2011-Introduction of LTE-Advanced Rel-9 9.x.y December 2009 Rel-8 8.x.y December 2008-Introduction of LTE It is interesting to note the caveats that 3GPP places along with this roadmap information: After a release is frozen, no new content can be added, but protocol specifications may still not be complete-in simpler terms, the what part of the release may be finalized, but details about implementation may still be under work. Different parts of specification version numbers can be incremented for different reasons and the "y" part is only for a flawed implementation of a specification version. Now that the roadmap items are available, one may want to look at what content is available as per Rel 11, slated to be complete by June 2013 (which will be the nearest planned release at the time of writing of this chapter). To do this, the roadmap should provide a way to obtain a detailed view of items, which 3G