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Nov. 17, 2009

Qualcomm reportedly has about 24 percent of all declarations surrounding LTE technology filed with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), according to a recent survey performed by ABI Research.

The survey reveals that other major LTE patent holders include InterDigital with 18 percent, Huawei with 10 percent, Nokia with about 9.1 percent and Samsung with less than 7.2 percent.

When considering the whole 4G environment, Samsung takes second spot with 12 percent of all patent filings, and Nokia takes third with 6 percent.

Report author and ABI researcher Stuart Carlaw warned that major changes could come ahead, however. "Given that these declarations reflect work completed more than a year-and-a-half ago, it is feasible that this landscape could shift again between now and 2011 as we see the 4G market gather momentum," Carlaw said in a report.

Carlaw added that he saw "no major reason why the licensing situation in LTE technology will be significantly different from that for 3G. The only major change is that the list of haves has changed significantly to embrace newly active patent holders such as Samsung and Huawei."

In addition to LTE patent declarations, ABI research also found that Qualcomm has about 16 percent of the 26,000 global patents with potential relevance to 4G technologies, including Wi-Max.

The overall number of patents held by a company on a particular technology does not necessarily bear a direct connection to that company's overall share of intellectual property rights. Generally speaking, the relevancy of patents to a particular technology is more important the quantity of patents held on a technology.

Carlaw based his findings on analysis of IEEE declarations of essentiality as well as a full search of patents relating to OFDM, OFDMA, Beamforming, SDMA, HARQ, SC-FDMA, MIMO and Fast Power Control.

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Source: ABI Research.