The Telecommunications area of COST has already in its tradition a stream of very successful Actions that dealt with mobile and wireless communications, and have contributed to the development and standardisation of commercial systems:

• COST 207, "Digital Land Mobile Radio Communications", March 1984 - September 1988, which contributed to the development of GSM, providing the channel model;
  
  
• COST 231, "Evolution of Land Mobile Radio (Including Personal) Communications", April 1989 - April 1996, which contributed to the deployment of GSM1800 and to the development of DECT, HIPERLAN 1 and UMTS, and defined propagation models for the GSM band that are recommended by 3GPP and ITU-R;

• COST 259, "Wireless Flexible Personalised Communications", December 1996 - April 2000, which contributed to the deployment of DECT and HIPERLAN 1 and to the development of UMTS and HIPERLAN2, conducted simulations over the dispute on the access technique for UMTS (TDMA versus CDMA), supporting ETSI on its decisions, and supported 3GPP in the development of a channel model;

• COST 273, "Towards Mobile Broadband Multimedia Communications", May 2001 - June 2005, which contributed to standardisation efforts in 3GPP and to the deployment of UMTS networks, provided channel models for MIMO systems and initial inputs to the research on B3G generation systems;

• COST 2100, "Pervasive Mobile & Ambient Wireless Communications", December 2006 - December 2010, which contributed to increase knowledge of mobile and wireless network technologies by exploring and developing new methods, models, techniques, strategies and tools to facilitate the implementation of next generation mobile radio communication systems and to foster the development of the paradigms of pervasive and ambient wireless communications.