Will LTE Become Mired in Intellectual Property Wars?

Six LTE vendors have agreed to an IPR licensing scheme amongst them, but three other vendors aren’t participating in this agreement?

Fierce Wireless reports on the press release from Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, Ericsson, Nokia, NextWave Wireless and Nokia that reveals an agreed upon frame work for the royalties for Intellectual Property for LTE technologies. The agreement calls for the six firms to decide among each other how the royalties will be split up. However, the total percentage of costs is set to be both in single digits as regards the percentage of the sales price of devices and in single digits in terms of dollars for laptop cards.

Perhaps what is most interesting as Fierce Wireless points out is that Qualcomm, Nortel and Motorola are not part of this agreement, although all three companies are expected to have significant IPR for this technology, which will be quite close to WiMAX in fact.

So what does this mean? Does this signal struggles for the LTE technology platform as some companies aren't brought into the fold as regards IPR? It is certainly possible as each of these firms have been known to defend their IPR fairly vigorously at times in the past. What concessions do the other six companies plan (if any) to make to bring these three other firms on board?

Also, since this agreement apparently does not specify what the exact portion of revenues will go to each firm, will infighting ensue? Despite my provocative title to this blog I don't think there will be any significant IPR battle waged here. There are too many entrenched customer relationships between these vendors and the carriers supporting LTE for them to field any type of scorched earth policies. What do you the broadband wireless public think? Do you agree with me? 

Tim Sanders

The Final Mile