Unpacking 3GPP standards

• Author: Justus Baron,Kirti Gupta
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jems.12258
• Date: 01 September 2018

Received: 8 September 2015 Revised: 5 February 2018 Accepted: 6 February 2018

DOI: 10.1111/jems.12258

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Unpacking 3GPP standards

Justus Baron1Kirti Gupta2

1Searle Center on Law,Regulation, and Eco-

nomic Growth, Northwestern University,

Chicago, Illinois

2Sr Dir, Economic Strategy,Qualcomm Inc.,

San Diego, California

Correspondence

JustusBaron, Searle Center on Law, Regula-

tion,and Economic Growth, Northwestern

University,Chicago, IL.

Email:Justus.Baron@law.northwestern.edu

Abstract

This paper describes a new database with detailed information on standardization

procedures at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). 3GPP is the most rele-

vant standard-setting organization (SSO) in the field of mobile telecommunications.

Empirical research on technology standards and SSOs has so far been limited by the

scarcity of available data. The present database contains information on member-

ship, meeting attendance, chairmanship, work items, contributions, and votes at 3GPP.

These data shed light on the technical complexity of standard development and illus-

trate the importance of voluntary contributions from SSO members. The data allow

addressing important policy questions regarding the regulation of voluntary SSOs and

the role of standard-essential patents in standardization.

KEYWORDS

innovation, mobile telecommunications, standard-setting organizations, technology standards

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

L15, L96, Y10

1INTRODUCTION

Technology standards represent a set of rules and technologies adopted by a group of actors to ensure interoperability between

products and services and that they meet specific industry requirements. The important role of technology standards is well

understood in the Information and Communication Technology(ICT) industry, as they are necessary for enabling mobile wireless

communications and the operation of the Internet. In many parts of the ICT industry, technology standards have traditionally

been defined cooperatively by governments or industry actors, working together to define technical features of new products or

services, within formal standard-setting organizations (SSOs).

SSOs are open and voluntary organizations using consensus-based processes to develop technological standards. Until

recently, SSOs were little studied in the economic literature. Early research on technology standards was either theoretical

or qualitative. Quantitative empirical research on technology standards is more recent, and is still limited to date by the scarcity

of available data. Yet, in recent years, the functioning of SSOs and the nature of the conduct of participants in standard setting

have been the focus of many public policy and scholarly discussions.

Many of these discussions have revolved around the role of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in standard setting.

In particular, many SSOs have specific policies for the disclosure and licensing of IPR that are potentially essential

The Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth is making the database described in this paper available to academic researchersbeginning in

March 2018.

Research at the Searle Center on Law,Regulation, and Economic Growth was financially supported by Qualcomm.

J Econ Manage Strat. 2018;27:433–461. © 2018 WileyPeriodicals, Inc. 433wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jems

434 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENTSTRATEGY

to technology standards.1Several issues have been raised around the licensing of standard-essential patents (SEPs), and

proposals abound for changes in IPR policies of SSOs, valuation techniques for SEPs applied by the courts, as well as some

proposed antitrust measures (Lemley, 2007; Federal Trade Commission Report, 2011; Kuhn, Scott-Morton, & Shelanski,

2013).

Nevertheless, there still is a lack of empirical research on how standards are developed, how different parties contribute to

standard development, and how IPR and other policy instruments shape the incentives to contribute. To date, no systematic

and comprehensive database on the process of standard development and the functioning of SSOs is available for analyzing

these issues empirically. The policy debate is therefore to a large extent based on economic theory and anecdotal evidence. In

consequence, many proposed reforms have been criticized as being at odds with the complex institutional and technological

realities of standard setting.

Existing empirical research has shed some light on standard-setting processes at several SSOs (e.g., Leiponen, 2008; Simcoe,

2012). An important insight from this research is that there is a large heterogeneity in the rules and procedures of SSOs. Although

some SSOs only allow individual participation, other SSOs have formal member organizations (most commonly companies).

Each SSO has its own rules for the development and approval of technical specifications (TSs) and standards. “One size fits

all” approaches and policy recommendations may therefore not be appropriate for SSOs. Caution is warranted when drawing

general conclusions from the empirical evidence, because economic effects of standardization processes and the incentives of

the participating parties depend upon the complex institutional setting of SSOs, which differs from one organization to another.

We therefore believe that a deep dive in the institutional understanding of specific SSOs along with the relevant data collected

from these SSOs may help in significantly advancing the literature on standard setting. Detailed studies focusing on selected

important SSOs can reveal how and why firms participate in a specific standard-setting process, how participating in this process

affects the participating firms, and whether participation in SSOs enables coordination and knowledge sharing. Careful empirical

analysis of selected standardization processes can furthermore shed light on how technical contributions and the participation of

specific actors determine the success of the resulting standards. Ultimately, such analyses can providea solid basis for informed

policy making for these important institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new database on the standard-setting process for widely adopted and successful

third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) wireless cellular standards defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project

(3GPP), a consortium of seven SSOs. The dataset will be made available to academic researchers and it provides manifold

opportunities for empirical research on standardization processes at 3GPP.2We selected 3GPP for our study, because several

of the issues being raised with respect to standards and SEPs are related to the wireless communications standards developed

in this organization. The interest in 3GPP is unsurprising, given the enormous success enjoyed by the standards developed

at 3GPP, and the enormous global economic impact they have generated. According to one estimate, the mobile value chain

generated almost $3.3 trillion in revenue globally in 2014 and is directly responsible for 11 million jobs. This study identifies

3G and 4G wireless cellular standards defined by 3GPP as one of the major drivers of this economic impact (Bezerra et al.,

2015).

This paper reflects a large data collection effort for unpacking the details of 3GPP standards from thousands of documents

collected from the SSO's archives, such as meeting records, membership records, specifications, and technical contributions.

Our goal is to further the understanding of the standard-setting process and share some preliminary insights from the data on

3GPP standards. We hope that this dataset will also serve as a template for the generation of other comprehensive datasets for

studying and unpacking other SSOs. The collected data on 3GPP can be used in combination with two related databases: the

Searle Center Database on Technology Standards and SSOs (Baron & Spulber, 2018), and a database of declared SEPs (Baron

& Pohlmann, 2018). The three databases share a system of common identifiers and all are available from the Searle Center for

academic researchers.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a survey of the literature on technology standards, with a

focus on studies of single SSOs. A comprehensive analysis of a single SSO involves collecting data on various aspects of that

SSO, requiring to first understand the institutional structure of that SSO. Therefore, Section 3 provides a historical overview

of the formation of 3GPP and the 3G and 4G standards under discussion. Section 4 discusses the organization structure, rules,

and procedures followed by 3GPP for the development of standards. After we assembled several data files via web scraping

and downloading, we collated the files, cleaned the data, and standardized firm names across files to generate a comprehensive

dataset that we organize into five major categories: membership, attendance, contributions, change requests (CRs), and TSs.

Section 5 presents and discusses the methodology of the data collection. Section 6 presents in detail the data on various aspects

of 3GPP standard development. Section 7 concludes with some immediate insights and potential future research questions that

this dataset may help answering.