ould specify 5G¹¹ and therefore it is hard to overestimate its importance to the wireless industry. That importance now attracts many more companies and delegates to 3GPP, SO that the numbers of delegates attending, member companies, and documents submitted to each meeting have grown dramatically when 3GPP has started working on 5G. Figure 2.12 illustrates that when 5G standardization activities started in 3GPP, the number of delegates attending increased by more than 50%. Increased number of companies and delegates does not necessarily mean increased pro- ductivity; in fact oftentimes the opposite is true, as 3GPP works by consensus and with bigger numbers of participants consensus is harder to reach. Figure 2.13, for example, illus- trates that the number of approved Change Requests (CRs) grew exponentially over the years, as 3GPP grew in popularity. 3GPP standards, of course, undergo an extreme amount of peer review and scrutiny, which helps to ensure high quality specifications. However, increased number of partic- ipants often means that more compromises have to be made and often the only way to reach consensus is by adopting multiple options into specifications. One consequence is that NR and NG-RAN specifications have many more options compared with LTE. On one hand, this makes the standards more flexible; on the other hand it makes it much harder to implement, as it is sometimes hard to tell which options are actually going to be deployed. One example of such "extreme flexibility" is the multitude of multiconnectivity options, described in Section 4.3. While 3GPP is by no means the only SDO developing wireless technologies, with the only exception of IEEE, the situation with other SDOs is peculiar. Largely due to 3GPP success, other competing standards (i.e. standards defining mobile broadband technologies) went largely extinct. In the past, there were at least two more prominent SDOs: WiMAX forum 3GPP2: the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2. 11 Indeed, most technologies being submitted to IMT-2020 are