DailyWireless reports The dream of driving down LTE royalty levels dramatically is fading, says Caroline Gabriel at Rethink Research. Intel and Samsung have sought to spearhead an open, transparent and low royalty structure for WiMAX patents and formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) in June 2008.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with LTE. Qualcomm and its GSM technology counterpart InterDigital together control 40% of the LTE patent pool, with 19% and 21% of total patents, respectively, says Informa. Most LTE supporters want the royalty bill to be a one percentage of the sale price in an LTE handset, but IPR owners appear to be pushing it closer to 5% – similar to Qualcomm’s IPR tab.
