Manufacturers support LTE

Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson have today announced a mutual commitment to a framework for establishing predictable and more transparent maximum aggregate costs for licensing intellectual property rights (IPR) that relate to 3GPP Long Term Evolution and Service Architecture Evolution standards (LTE/SAE). The framework is based on the prevalent industry principle of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms for essential patents. This means that the companies agree, subject to reciprocity, to reasonable, maximum aggregate royalty rates based on the value added by the technology in the end product and to flexible licensing arrangements according to the licensors' proportional share of all standard essential IPR for the relevant product category.

Specifically, the companies support that a reasonable maximum aggregate royalty level for LTE essential IPR in handsets is a single-digit percentage of the sales price (that is: less than 10%). For notebooks, with embedded LTE capabilities, the companies support a single-digit dollar amount as the maximum aggregate royalty level (less than 10$). The parties believe the market will drive the LTE licensing regime to be in accordance with these principles and aggregate royalty levels.

A major advantage of LTE for network providers is, they can further improve current 3G networks, meaning that there is no need to change the whole infrastructure. 3GPP Release 8 LTE standards (to be introduced in 2010 at best) promise 326 megabit maximum download and 86 megabit upload speed. Nokia has demonstrated earlier a 173 megabit download speed. LTE would go through many smaller steps until the introduction of 4G networks.