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| WiMAX vendors try to pool themselves together |
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| Friday, 13 June 2008 | |
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Open Patent
To accelerate the wider adoption and deployment of WiMAX technology and products, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Intel Corporation, Samsung Electronics and Sprint have set up the Open Patent Alliance (OPA). The OPA aims to advance a competitive and open intellectual property rights (IPR) model, in the process stimulating a larger WiMAX industry that supports innovation through broader choice and lower equipment and service costs for WiMAX technology, devices and applications globally. To accomplish its goals, the OPA will form a WiMAX patent pool to help participating companies obtain access to patent licenses from patent owners at a predictable cost. The patent pool will aggregate essential patent rights needed to implement the WiMAX standard as defined by the WiMAX Forum and the IEEE 802.16e standard. To promote product differentiation and interoperability at a more predictable cost, this approach will focus on providing a more competitive royalty structure by charging only for the features required to develop WiMAX products. The patent pool will incorporate a variety of royalty licensing solutions, including accounting for cross-licensing among individual members within the pool. The OPA will issue a call for WiMAX essential patents for inclusion in its patent pool. An independent third-party reviewer will serve as the ‘patent referee’ and will evaluate submitted patents to determine how essential they are to the WiMAX standard and WiMAX Forum profiles. While the OPA initially will focus its efforts on the WiMAX standard, it says it may work with other industry groups in the future. In setting up the patent pool the OPA creators are to a large degree replicating the LTE community’s IPR licensing initiative announced in April (click); LTE, once WiMAX’s deadly 4G rival, is now increasingly being viewed as its Siamese twin. Indeed, Alcatel-Lucent is both a member of OPA and of the LTE/SAE FRAND. 4-lorn hope? Industry wisdom is that the mobile community paid too much for 3G WCDMA in IPR fees – Pyramid Research has previously calculated that while the mobile industry norm for IPR ‘tax’ is 2% to 5%, WCDMA phones typically run at 10% to 15% and, if the vendor has no patents, can reach 25% (click). Certainly the hope with 4G in general, and with WiMAX in particular, is that the IPR tax can be minimised (made nominal, if possible). But doubts have been expressed whether this is a realistic hope (click and click). Interestingly, or not as the case may be, well known 4G IPR owners Qualcomm and Ericsson are not yet signed-up as OPA members, nor is lesser known player Canada’s Wi-LAN Inc. WiMAX patents owner Nortel is also absent (Nortel has just announced that it has decided to concentrate on LTE R&D internally and henceforth work on WiMAX through a strategic alliance with Alvarion). The OPA reports that it expects to secure participation of an additional six to nine investor companies to encompass the WiMAX value-chain and broad geographic representation. In IPR terms, who those investors might be could hinge not on what they bring to the party, but on what the party might bring to them. John Williamson |
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