Open Patent Alliance creates WiMAX pool, eyes LTE

The Open Patent Alliance (OPA), formed last year to create an IPR framework for 4G technologies, initially WiMAX, has delivered the details of its plan as promised. It used the occasion to highlight its headstart, in licensing terms, on LTE, making a veiled bid to set the pattern for that technology too.

The OPA has issued a call for patents and will create a patent pool, choosing Via Licensing to manage the process, which aims to establish a transparent system for the essential IPR in WiMAX, and to support the WiMAX Forum’s stated principles of reasonable and non-discriminatory patent fees. The WiMAX community has consistently upheld low licensing fees and an open process as a key differentiator from the cellular technologies, especially as it bids to create an ecosystem of low cost, standards-based devices on the PC industry model.

The key members of the OPA are Acer, Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Cisco, Clearwire, Huawei, Intel and Samsung. Although precise details of patent holdings in Mobile WiMAX remain sketchy, the last two are understood to be the largest IPR owners, and both have publicly supported open, low cost licensing and the patent pool approach. OPA president Yung Hahn says the pool will not be the only method - bilateral deals are so prevalent in wireless that they will not disappear overnight, but can be improved by a parallel process. He told FierceBroadbandWireless : “We started with the notion that we need to prove that bilateral agreements aren’t the only solution and that a patent pool could actually be very beneficial. We aren’t patent pool bigots, and clearly it didn’t work in 3G, but in the case of WiMAX, we have concluded that it will work and work well in combination with bilateral agreements.”

The OPA and Via have issued a call for patents, which will be evaluated by a third party arbiter to decide whether they are essential. Meanwhile, Hahn is boasting of the Alliance’s clear lead over LTE in clarifying patent structures. The LTE community, despite the failure of pools in 3G, is looking to use this approach too, but so far its attempts to set up an open licensing framework have been fragmented. Some key patent holders have stayed outside all such efforts - notably the ever-important Qualcomm, and Nortel (a situation that may, of course, change, once the acquisition of its LTE assets by Nokia Siemens is finalized).

Even among the pool supporters, there are three separate efforts. The three main wireless technology patent pool operators, Sisvel, Via Licensing and MPEG LA, have all issued calls for LTE patents. “For the health of the industry, we’d like to see the three collapse into one,” Hahn said in an interview.

Talking to Rethink Wireless last month, he was more aggressive, aiming to extend the OPA model to LTE too. There can only be one pool for each technology, he said, and competing technologies cannot be managed within one pool, but a single umbrella organization can run sub-pools for each platform, and can then benefit by offering good terms, especially to vendors that need to license the same patents in multiple pools. The drive, then, will be towards an over-arching patent pool for the 4G technologies, and the OPA clearly intends to use its headstart in the process to make a firm pitch for this important, if deeply political, role.

Meanwhile, outside any pools that may emerge for LTE, Ericsson has started signing its first licensing deals for its patents in the technology, which are likely to be significant. Gustav Brismark, VP of patent strategies at the Swedish giant, told Reuters that the company has more than 80 patent agreements in place for GSM and W-CDMA and that “the first agreements including LTE have been signed, and over time more or less all these agreements will be renegotiated to include LTE, but that will not be done in a day”. He added: “We see that we are keeping our leading position as we go from GSM to W-CDMA to LTE. That is important to be able to continue the strategy of having license revenues as one part of what Ericsson makes money from.”