Patents deal aims to speed up 4g rollout

Licensing agreement by major manufacturers clears way for deployment of LTE mobile links

Major mobile equipment makers have agreed a patents deal to enable the rapid developing of Long Term Evolution (LTE), which looks likely to become the leading 4g wireless technology.

The companies, including Nokia and Ericsson, committed to a licensing framework that ensures that royalties for the use of LTE will not exceed 10 percent of the device cost.

On an LTE-equipped laptop the aggregate royalties will be capped at $10.
LTE promises data rates of between 60Mbits/sec and 120Mbits/sec, depending on channel width – that is, how much expensive wireless bandwidth is assigned to a call.

These are the data rates per base-station sector and so are shared between users of public systems. LTE-enabled femtocell home base stations could offer the full speed, but real date rates could then be constrained by the user's fixed broadband link which provides the back channel to the operator.

LTE is designed to answer a growing demand for mobile broadband; but the rush to deploy it has been given added impetus by the emergence of Wimax technology.
Intel notebooks will support mobile Wimax by default from later this year. But the technology is similar to that of LTE and it would be relatively simple for modules to support both.

That, however, would entail paying two sets of royalties. So like many similar industry battles, most recently that over HD formats, the issue is as much about who gets royalties as about technological merit.

The LTE deal is based on what is called Frand, which is short for 'fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory' licensing terms by which companies agree to maximum aggregate royalty rates based on the value added by a patented technology.

Ericsson senior vice-president Håkan Eriksson said: "The adoption of this initiative will reassure operators of the early widespread adoption of LTE technology throughout the consumer electronics industry,"

Other signatories include NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson. Notably absent is Qualcomm, which is pushing a rival technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband.