SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- To accelerate the widespread adoption and deployment of WiMAX technology and products, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Intel Corporation, Samsung Electronics and Sprint today announced the formation of the Open Patent Alliance (OPA). The OPA will advance a competitive and open intellectual property rights model, thus stimulating a larger WiMAX industry that supports innovation through broader choice and lower equipment and service costs for WiMAX technology, devices and applications globally.
WiMAX is a 4G, IP-based broadband wireless technology that provides low-cost, multi-megabit speed and greater throughput for the mobile Internet era of video-rich content and bandwidth-intensive applications. It is based on the IEEE 802.16e standard.
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 help ensure 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.
In addition to the formation of a WiMAX patent pool, the OPA will educate the WiMAX ecosystem about, and serve as a central resource for WiMAX intellectual property rights topics.
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 may work with other industry groups in the future.
Made up of six founding companies at its inception, the OPA expects to secure participation of an additional six to nine investor companies to encompass the WiMAX value-chain and broad geographic representation. Each investor company will have a seat on the OPA board of directors. The OPA will have dedicated staff that is directed by and accountable to the OPA board, and the alliance will serve as the licensing agent for the WiMAX patent pool, representing the licensors who agree to participate in the pool.
OPA Founded With Broad, Cross-Industry Support
“As an early and consistent supporter of the WiMAX 802.16e ecosystem, Alcatel-Lucent believes that end-user experiences will drive the broadband wireless revolution,” said Philippe Keryer, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s mobile access business. “We are confident that the formation of the Open Patent Alliance, which is fully in line with Alcatel-Lucent's Open CPE Program, will ensure that a broad and diverse set of devices will be available to the consumer, enabling service providers to deliver an unparalleled selection of applications and optimized device form-factors that can unleash the huge potential of broadband wireless anywhere, anytime, that WiMAX enables.”
It's nice to see efforts to reduce the risk associated with the intellectual property used in WiMAX and LTE. However, neither pools are comparable to Qualcomm's dominant CDMA intellectual properties. The first comment that most analysts had when these pools were announced was that key patent owners are missing from the pools.
The intellectual property situation for WiMAX and LTE is so fragmented that it's getting really hard for a company contemplating R&D projects in those areas. I know that this position may not be popular, but I think it was better when only Qualcomm had most of the intellectual property. At least, it was taking a lot of uncertainty our of the equation. As you may well know, business people often prefer the certainty of a high (but reasonable) cost to the uncertainty of an unknown cost.
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