Wireless Technologies and Deployments

Many nations and some regions have their own telecoms standards bodies, responsible for coordinating the development and deployment of new telecoms systems. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is the organisation responsible for coordinating the development of the most widely deployed cellular technologies. The successive waves of cellular technology can be broadly and loosely classified into a series of ‘generations’, each of which can be further subdivided into the sets of technologies that are employed in different regions. Although the vast majority of deployed commercial networks use the 3GPP/3GPP2 technologies there is a possibility that a forensic radio surveyor may be asked to survey one of these other network types. Terrestrial Trunked Access (TETRA) uses a heavily adapted version of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) that offers ‘group communication’ functions in addition to standard ‘one to one’ connections.