LTE Patent Ownership Still Uncertain as Companies Make Claims
Though little is known about key LTE patent holders and their asset values, companies like Ericsson and Nokia are already projecting how much essential intellectual property rights they will have for LTE. Meanwhile, the fate of Canadian vendor Nortel’s estimated large LTE patent assets is still pending, making the 4G patent ownership landscape even more unclear, experts said.
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It’s not yet known who holds key LTE patents because the technology’s still in its early development stage and no one has really analyzed the overall portfolio, said Scott McKeown of law firm Oblon, Spivak’s electrical/mechanical practice group. That doesn’t stop Ericsson from claiming that it has about 25 percent of the essential patents for LTE. This share will put the vendor in the top intellectual property position in the industry, said Kasim Alfalahi, Ericsson’s chief intellectual property officer. Some main features of the essential LTE patents are focused in areas like interface between devices and networks, he said. But the projection is only an estimate, he noted: Due to pending patent applications, it’s hard to know whether an issued patent is essential or not.
Nokia believes it will have 20 to 30 percent of “all LTE standards-essential IPR,” the company said. But it acknowledged there has been considerable uncertainty in the industry regarding the future IPR cost of LTE technology. The industry wants to have more predictability and transparency of IPR licensing costs, it said. But LTE standardization is a long process and it’s likely to take several years before there’s reliable information about essential patent ownership in the industry, Nokia said. Huawei believes it will have 15 to 20 percent of essential IPR for the LTE standard, it said.
Analysts offered a different picture: A report from research firm TechIPm showed that, at 32 percent market share, Qualcomm is the leader in essential LTE patents, followed by InterDigital at 19 percent and Nokia at 12 percent. Ericsson has a six percent share, said the report, which looked at published patent applications and issued patents in the U.S. before March 1. A total of 786 declared essential patent candidates were used in the analysis. Other companies holding significant LTE IPR include Samsung, LG and Huawei, the report said. Still, clear visibility of what the essential patents are and their ownership would be confined to the largest industry players, several analysts said. Even in the case of the main players, there’s still a margin of error in their estimates due to differences in interpretation of the standard and implementation roadmaps, they said.
Bankrupt Nortel Networks could raise up to $1 billion selling its patents to rivals like Research in Motion, Cisco Systems and others, Oblon’s McKeown said. Essential LTE patents are the “crown jewelry” of Nortel’s portfolio, he said. The vendor, which was reportedly taking bids for its 4,500 patents, could have about 100 essential LTE patents, he said. Cisco, RIM and Nortel declined to comment, their spokesmen said. Meanwhile, three separate companies, including Sisvel, Via Licensing and MPEG LA, are steadily recruiting patent holders into LTE patent pools, they said. But don’t expect key patent holders to join any patent pools, at least not any time soon, analysts said.