Standardization process

In 1986, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) decided to begin standardization work on a universal land-based radio system, i.e. a global mobile communications standard designed to replace both existing cellular systems and professional radio systems. Several countries began thinking about this system, provisionally called FPLMTS (Future Public Land Mobile Telecommunication System).

In Europe, RACE 1 and then RACE 2 research programs in the early 1990s led to the development of prototypes for the radio interface of systems intended to succeed GSM. Two systems emerged, one of them based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). At the same time, in the United States, the very first systems using this transmission principle, already...