Who develops the 5G NR standard, and in what three phases does the standardisation work proceed?
5G NR is developed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) — a consortium of telecommunications companies that sets the technical standards for mobile radio. Standardisation proceeds in three phases: first "study items" (exploratory discussions of specific topics), then working groups that write the specification, then market launch with ongoing improvements and adjustments.
* Study → specify → ship: the NSA milestone came first by design, and LTE kept evolving alongside. *
Who: the 3GPP is the same body that standardised UMTS and LTE — an association of telecom companies that jointly define mobile-network standards. The first version of 5G NR appeared in Release 15. (Don't confuse roles: 3GPP builds the technology; the ITU's IMT-2020 is the yardstick it must meet — see the IMT-2020 card.)
How — the fixed working method:
- Study items — exploratory deliberations on specific topics ("is this worth standardising, and how?")
- Working groups — formal groups are established to write the actual specifications
- Market launch — the standard ships, then gets improvements and adjustments from real-world experience
How that played out for 5G: a first 5G study item ran under Release 14 (~2016), Release 15 study items turned into Release 15 work items, and the work was deliberately split so an intermediate Non-Standalone (NSA) milestone shipped before the full Release 15 — which is what enabled the first commercial deployments as early as 2019. Release 16 work followed (IoT and low latency), and Release 17+ continues evolving 5G. LTE kept evolving in parallel as a critical part of the 5G platform — 4G wasn't abandoned, it became 5G's companion (and NSA's control-plane anchor).
Tip: Study → specify → ship. The NSA-first milestone in the Release 15 work explains a fact you'll meet again in the deployment cards: early 5G was almost entirely NSA.
Go deeper:
3GPP (Wikipedia) — who the partnership actually is (seven regional standards bodies), how its TSG working groups are organised, and the full release history.- Introducing 3GPP (3gpp.org) — the consortium in its own words: how specifications are produced in release cycles and handed to the regional bodies for transposition.