3GPP Brain · 5G NR · evidence-grounded

Answers to the hardest 3GPP questions — with the receipts.

SME-level 5G NR answers where every claim is labeled grounded or inferred, and every citation is machine-verified against the spec archive before you ever see it. No vector database. No hallucinated references.

Exhibit 1 — A verified answer
Q

What triggers sr-TransMax exhaustion, and what does the UE do next?

When Scheduling Request transmissions reach sr-TransMax, the MAC entity ✓ grounded releases PUCCH/SRS, clears configured grants, and initiates Random Access on the SpCell.

Latency-sensitive traffic ~ inferred can then stall for the RA back-off.

TS 38.321 §5.4.4 — verified against the archive
9,535spec sections indexed
100%citations machine-verified
511compiled knowledge concepts
91.7blind SME benchmark · +24 vs vector RAG
Why it holds up under scrutiny

An answer is only as good as the citation behind it.

Built to survive real scrutiny: auditable, deterministic, and honest about the boundary between what the spec says and what it implies.

Labeled

Grounded vs inferred

Every claim is tagged spec-grounded or mechanism-inferred — you always know what you can cite and what is analysis.

Verified

Checked, not trusted

Every citation is validated against a registry of 9,535 spec sections and 5,027 tables. Fabricated references cannot survive to display.

Cross-spec

Synthesis, not lookup

Connects behavior across RRC, MAC, and PHY (38.331 / 38.321 / 38.211) to answer the cross-layer questions a single spec section never does.

The method

Structure the knowledge at ingestion — not at query time.

Unlike conventional RAG, there is no embedding model and no semantic similarity search. Knowledge is compiled into structure once, then retrieved deterministically.

01

Compile

Raw 3GPP specs are compiled by a two-agent pipeline into 511 discrete, structured knowledge concepts — not chunked text.

02

Ground & verify

Answers are grounded on retrieved concepts, labeled grounded / inferred, then every citation is checked against the section registry.

03

Learn safely

Knowledge gaps trigger targeted ingestion through gated, reviewed updates — the corpus grows without drift.

Exhibit 2 — SME benchmark

91.7 blind SME benchmark score — 24 points above vector RAG.

On a blind SME benchmark of expert 5G NR questions, OKF v2 scored 91.7 / 100 — 24 points ahead of vanilla vector RAG. The same query model and grounding prompt were used for every system; only the corpus and retriever differ.

System
Retrieval
Score / 100
ask3gpp — OKF v2
Structured + BM25, rerank
91.7
Vanilla vector RAG
Dense embeddings
67.3
OKF + embeddings
Hybrid dense
53.1

Cold-start SME eval set v1 · 20 expert questions · blind rubric scoring · comparative signal across systems.

Exhibit 3 — Economics

SME-grade answers at a fraction of the cost.

Structuring knowledge at ingestion means each query carries a small, bounded context — and the retrieval layer is commodity infrastructure. The result is deterministic, auditable, and cheap to run.

~93%
Lower / query

Bounded context

A ~45,000-token vector-RAG query collapses to a capped ~12 KB structured window (~3,000 tokens) — the platform's own token metric reports up to ~93% lower cost per query, a ~15× reduction.

$0
Vector infra

No embedding stack

No embedding model to run, no vector database to host, scale, or re-index. Retrieval is SQLite FTS5 BM25 — commodity, deterministic, near-zero standing infrastructure.

Tiered models

Compile-once economics

Ingestion runs on a cheaper model tier than live queries, and specs are compiled once — not re-embedded on every question. Cost scales with knowledge, not with traffic.

Cost figures are per-query context vs a 45,000-token traditional-RAG baseline, from the platform's built-in token-efficiency metric. Actual spend varies with question mix and model provider.

Contact

See it answer your hardest question.

Send us a real 3GPP question your team has argued about. We'll show you the grounded answer, the labels, and the verified citation — live.

✉ support@ask3gpp.com
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At a glance

511OKF concepts
9,535spec sections
3138-series specs
5,027tables indexed
100%verified cites
BM25no vectors

Answers are decision-support — not a substitute for the official 3GPP specifications. Coverage expands via targeted ingestion.