Licensing Rates in the Telecommunications Industry

Over the years we've reported on a number of licensing deals in the telecommunications industry. I've just been reading a highly interesting article by Eric Stasik of the Avvika company based in Stockholm. Erik has done a wonderful job in collecting together publicly available data on licensing rates for the proposed LTE standard. He's gathered a tremendous amount of information.

One of the fascinating points made by Eric is that compared to the earlier mobile telecommunications standards, the number of "essential patents" and also the number of individual patent holders has increased for the forthcoming LTE standard. Eric goes onto note that many of the smaller patent holders have more interest in obtaining royalty revenues than the larger "more established" players. He concludes that the putative licensing pools being organised by the likes of Sisvel, Via Licensing and MPEG-LA could well benefit by engaging with the smaller players to encourage them to join.

The article is published in the Licensing Executive Society International Les Nouvelles journal, September 2010, pages 114-119.

Technorati Tags:
Standards, Telecommunications, MPEG-LA, Via Licensing

New CDMA2000 patent pool launched

This week Sisvel launched a new joint patent licensing program, offering a licence to essential CDMA2000 patents (patents for hybrid 2.5G/3G technology of mobile telecommunications standards that use CDMA, code division multiple access, a multiple access scheme for digital radio enabling the sending of data between mobile phones and cell sites) on “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms”. The patents included in the program are owned by big players such as France Telecom, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and Siemens.

Sisvel, the Italian consumer electronics group, started in 1982 and today is one of the leading companies in managing IP and maximizing the value of patent rights. Sisvel will act on behalf of the patent owners as licensing administrator for the program, which is designed to make essential CDMA2000 patents more easily accessible and ensure that users can “benefit from the flexibility and practicality of the license terms available”. The royalty rate for all included functions under any license is “only US$ 0.05 per patent family per unit, up to a cap of US$ 0.50 per unit for products that include the 1x-RTT air interface but have no EV-DO functionality, and a cap of US$ 1.00 per unit for products that include the EV-DO air interface”.

More information is available here and some CDMA2000 market statistics can be found on the CDMA Development Group website here.