3GPP

building is we're building a 5G OFDM base station and a 6G OTFS base station.

I call it 6G whether or not it goes through 3GPP or not.

Let's set that aside.

Here's what I would say about it.

It's going to coincide

with 6G.

It's going to coincide with 6G, and if the right thing to do is take it through 3GPP and people line up and do the right thing, we'll do it.

If not, we'll have a proprietary technology that's capable of doing 6G, but it also is capable of doing things that we hold for ourselves.

whereby we've actually adopted cellular-based standards to build an IoT solution, but using our satellite network.

What do I mean by that? Well, in the cellular marketplace, 3GPP defines the standards for all cellular operators, including the IoT standards.

We've adopted a 3GPP standard.

It's in release 19, which is the currently ratified release of 3GPP.

And it means that any operator, any cellular operator, as well as anybody that's developing a IoT solution can build to a known standard.

And what that means for Iridium is it means that we get to take advantage of the scale that much of the cellular industry has managed to build.

The industry is currently moving through the period from 2026 into early 2027.

In the telecommunications world, we are in what is called the 3GPP release 20 study phase.

OK, I'm going to stop you there because for the listener who might not be a radio frequency engineer, we kind of need to define 3GPP.

Like, why does this acronym matter to a farmer in Iowa or a commercial building owner in Dallas?

That's fair.

So 3GPP stands for the Third Generation Partnership Project.

You can think of them as the United Nations of Telecommunications.

Oh, OK.

Lot of, uh, uh, translation into physical effort has happened.

We, we have, uh, committees and we have forums, 6G forums, which, which are being, uh, subscribed to or which are being populated by industry as well as government, where they sit down, debate, and then they carry whatever is are the results of those, uh, uh, confabulations into world forums like 3GPP and into ITU to convert it into standards.

So tho- those sort of things have happened.

Simultaneously, we know for sure that, uh, silicon has to come in, come from India.

Today's guest helped shape the tech we use every day.

He spent his early days testing the original Bluetooth technology and is a contributor to 3GPP's wireless 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G specs.

It's safe to say Joaquín Tordesilla, now the VP of Software Transformation at Keysight, knows his wireless technology.

He's here to break down what's hot in wireless right now: non-terrestrial networks, early 6G efforts, and the growing role of software in test and measurement.

Uh, everybody's using it, uh, to, to connect to whatever type of, uh, services over the network.

Then it came all of this ecosystem of apps running the phones, uh, and, and created a kind of new use model for phones that came with 4G, and that has been kind of inherited in, in the 5G era.

And you've been involved in the 3GPP group for quite a while now.

Can you share some of your involvement in that group and the role of that group in driving wireless technologies?

It lets them do all that unnatural stuff.

It's codified globally in the upcoming 3GPP

release 21.

Okay,

The telecommunications industry operates on very strict timelines.

Right now, the global consortium that develops mobile protocols, they're known as 3GPP, they're working on release 21.

And that release will lock in the core technical standards for 6G around 2028 or 2029.

And once those standards are ratified, the commercial rollouts of 6G are slated to begin around 2030, right?