The GPRS specifications are written by the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI), the European counterpart of the American National Standard Institute (ANSI). GPRS stands for General Packet Radio System. GPRS provides packet radio access for mobile Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and time-division multiple access (TDMA) users.

GPRS is a new bearer service for GSM that greatly improves and simplifies wireless access to packet data networks, e.g., to the Internet. It applies a packet radio principle to transfer user data packets in an efficient way between GSM mobile stations and external packet data networks. Packets can be directly routed from the GPRS mobile stations to packet switched networks.