Chris Pudney has the respect of the 3GPP leadership. Proof positive of this has been Chris’s recent nomination for a 3GPP Lifetime Achievement Award by all five of the recent past and newly elected Chairs of the Technical Specification Groups (TSGs) – The Plenary groups of the project.

At the latest 3GPP Project Coordination Group Meeting (London, April 25, 2023) the Chair and vice-Chairs of the top decision making group of the project ratified the Award, which has now been presented - during the SA2 WG meeting, in May.

Puneet Jain, TSG SA Chair, during his presentation of the award said of Chris Pudney: “Your passion and tireless pursuit of advancing 3GPP specification development and ecosystem engagement have been truly exceptional. Congratulations on this remarkable achievement and thank you for your outstanding contributions to 3GPP.”

Chris has been involved in almost all working groups in 3GPP, representing Vodafone, devoted to keeping an overall system perspective, but with an acknowledged passion for 5G Network Architecture and the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT). Both topics are areas where his fair minded and expert opinion is constantly sought.

He was Rapporteur of 4G Core Network System Architecture Evolution (SAE) work and Editor of TR 23.882, the Report on technical options and conclusions. Work on TS 23.401 for GPRS enhancements for E-UTRAN access cemented him as instrumental in the success of some of the fundamental parts of the 3GPP 4G work.

He drove the GERAN work (TR 45.820) that led to NB-IoT arriving as an urgent topic in Release 13 in both TSG RAN and TSG SA, via his leadership in WG SA2. After NB-IoT, Chris was a rapporteur for the work on the 5G Non-StandAlone (NSA) architecture enhancements, helping to drive it to a successful conclusion. On the 5G Core, Chris identified the EPC-virtualisation issues that 5GC should not replicate and subsequently drove detailed debugging work – especially around topics that spanned multiple working groups in 3GPP.

Chris helped guide Rel-17 LTE User Plane Integrity Protection through SA3, SA2, CT1, CT4, RAN2 and RAN3. He was rapporteur for the RAN WID “UPIP_SEC_LTE-RAN-Core” and subsequently kicked off the LTE UPIP test specification work in RAN5. LTE UPIP protects 5G devices that are RF-jammed on 5G and forced onto 4G.

His two decades of involvement in 3GPP and a catalogue of achievements, with a few highlights only mentioned here, make Chris Pudney the worthy eighth recipient of the 3GPP Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Chris joins our permanent roll of honour for the Lifetime Achievers at https://www.3gpp.org/about-us/achievement-awards/lifetime-achievement-award

Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP