When you work with GSM/cellular systems, the definite resource are the
specifications. They were originally released by ETSI, later by 3GPP.
The problem start with the fact that there are separate numbering
schemes. Everyone in the cellular industry I know always uses the
GSM/3GPP TS numbering scheme, i.e. something like 3GPP TS 44.008.
However, ETSI assigns its own numbers to the specs, like ETSI TS
144008. Now in most cases, it is as simple s removing the '.' and
prefixing the '1' in the beginning. However, that's not always true and
there are exceptions such as 3GPP TS 01.01 mapping to ETSI TS
101855. To make things harder, there doesn't seem to be a
machine-readable translation table between the spec numbers, but there's
a website for spec number conversion at and then click
on 44.008, and one further click you had the desired PDF, served by
ETSI (3GPP apparently never provided PDF files).
However, in their infinite wisdom, at some point in 2016 the 3GPP
webmaster decided to remove those deep links. Rather than a nice long
list of released versions of a given spec,
then use a shell script that utilizes pdfgrep and awk to determine the
3GPP specification number (it is written in the title on the first
page of the document) and creating a symlink. Now I have something
like 44.008-4.0.0.pdf -> ts_144008v040000p.pdf
It's such a waste of resources to have to download all those files and
then write a script using pdfgrep+awk to re-gain the same usability that
the 3GPP chose to remove from their website. Now we can wait for ETSI
to disable indexing/recursion on their server, and easy and quick spec
access would be gone forever :/
Why does nobody care about efficiency these days?
If you're also an avid 3GPP spec reader, I'm publishing the rather
trivial scripts used at http://git.osmocom.org/3gpp-etsi-pdf-links
If you have contacts to the 3GPP webmaster, please try to motivate them
to reinstate the direct PDF links.
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