11/17/2009
TMCnet.com
According to ABI Research , a market research firm, Qualcomm (News – Alert) is the leading patent-holder in 4G wireless communications, after recording 24 percent of ETSI (News – Alert) declarations surrounding LTE, as well as 16 percent of the 26,000 patents that have potential relevance to 4G technologies generally, including WiMAX.
Other players in the LTE field include Interdigital (18 percent), Huawei (10 percent), LG (9 percent), Nokia (9 percent) and Samsung (News – Alert) (7 percent). When considering the whole 4G environment Samsung takes second spot with 12 percent of all patent filings, and Nokia comes third with 6 percent.
Stuart Carlaw, chief research officer at ABI Research, said, “Innovation in this space continues unabated. Given that these declarations reflect work completed 18 months ago, it is very feasible that this landscape could shift again during the coming two years as we see the 4G market ramp up.”
“We see no major reason why the licensing situation in 4G will be significantly different from that for 3G. There is still a big list of ‘haves’ but also a large list of ‘have-nots’. The only major change is that the list of haves has changed significantly to embrace newly active patent holders such as Samsung and Huawei,” added Carlaw.
The research was compiled through analysis of IEEE (News – Alert) 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. It forms part of the firm’s 4G Research Service.
4G Research Service covers the following technology and market issues, quantitative assessment of the 4G market across the ecosystem where subscribers, chipsets, devices, and infrastructure with segmentations by region and 4G air interface , qualitative assessment of key industry developments for strategy changes, contracts, and alliances for service providers and vendors, and WiMAX AndLTE ( News – Alert) evolutions, and visual map of 4G deployments city-by-city around the world for Google Earth Map of WiMAX and LTE deployments per city.
