Technocrat

WiMax Open Patent Alliance

zogger
Tue Jun 10 07:58:00 -0700 2008
Electronic+Freedom.
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Several of the major industry players in developing and promoting WiMax have formed the Open Patent Alliance (PDF release). They are aggregating and pooling all their various patents, and are going to use a neutral third party investigator to look at any additional patents and companies to see which should be included and how to license all the various patents.

.."The patent pool will aggregate essential patent rights needed to implement the WiMAX standard as defined by the WiMAX Forum and the IEEE 802.16e standard. To help ensure product differentiation and interoperability at a more predictable cost, this approach will focus on providing a more competitive royalty structure by charging only for the features required to develop WiMAX products. The patent pool will incorporate a variety of royalty licensing solutions, including accounting for cross-licensing among individual members within the pool...

WiMax Open Patent Alliance
squiggleslash
Tue Jun 10 08:24:29 -0700 2008
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But Qualcomm's a notable abstentee. Without Qualcomm, it's questionable this is of much use, they own huge amounts of ODFM patents, and they're one of the most litigious IP companies in the world.

The one positive thing is that Qualcomm is, reluctantly, backing LTE, which WiMax is an unnecessary competitor to (WiMax offers no advantages over LTE, it's just incompatible, and not fully featured enough to be even in the running as far as most telcos go.) So Qualcomm's absense may, in the end, sink WiMAX before we have a pointless HD DVD vs Blu-ray type thing, exept this time the superior technology will win out.

WiMax Open Patent Alliance
John Dalton
Wed Jun 11 02:45:36 -0700 2008
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I don't think WiFi vs. LTE is in the class as HD DVD vs Blu-ray.  The disc format war was about a physical item that could not easily be upgraded once in the market.  WiFi vs. LTE will be handled by software radio.  We don't need to choose since we can have both.

It remains to be seen how big a speed bump OFDM patents are.  The CSIRO patent, which describes the OFDM technology on which most wireless computer networks are based, was filed in November 1993.  To hold water Qalcomm's patents would have to preceed this date, in which case they have only five years to run.  MIMO patents might be a bigger worry, but even there the technology is now almost 15 years old.  Talk to a radio astronomer about MIMO and their response is "we've been doing that for ages".  I suspect a dig through the radio astronomy literature would yield a lot of prior art for MIMO.

WiMax Open Patent Alliance
squiggleslash
Wed Jun 11 06:44:30 -0700 2008
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Before the end of the HD DVD vs Blu-ray war, it became increasingly clear that the cost of making a drive that supported both formats wasn't substantially different than one that supported only one. The rest is "just software". So, in the end, there was no real reason why we couldn't have ended up with an ecosystem where both were supported by the majority of players, just as DVD+R and DVD-R are today. This wasn't seen as an option primarily for political reasons: both sides decided not to cooperate with one another and both wanted control over the hi-def media market. The result is a disaster, with Blu-ray - essentially a format with no real viability thanks to the incorporation of BD+ - being the "format of choice".

(Given this is Technocrat, I should probably point out it's a disaster for the Free Software community too: patents aside - which is only an issue in countries that mandate them - it was possible to produce Free (FSF definition) HD DVDs that could be played in regular HD DVD players and on boxes running only free software. This is not - and never will be - possible with Blu-ray, which mandates AACS on everything.)

As far as WiMAX vs LTE goes, software upgradability as a technical possibility isn't a panacea and is unlikely to have much effect. WiMAX and LTE devices will be made with different assumptions. Hardware manufacturers are unlikely to go to Sprint and say "Ok, you've figured out WiMAX is a dud, here's firmware updates for all 100 devices we sold you that will reconfigure them as LTE devices." Even if they did, Sprint would have to upgrade their entire infrastucture and make sure both networks are on at the same time during the transition. If hardware manufacturers were that amenable, then standards like UMA would have taken off as every GSM phone that supports Bluetooth would have had a firmware update supporting UMA-over-bluetooth pushed to it.

Qualcomm's patents may or may not be valid, but they'll still push them, and they know what they're doing. CDMA was hardly a particularly original technology at the time Qualcomm set the standards - what Qualcomm did was put the work into demonstrating the technology was viable and in the process patented numerous aspects of the technology that are revealed to be necessary when you actually make a workable system. Qualcomm took over one of the leaders in development of OFDM-over-radio a few years ago (I forget the name), and the probability is that they have a portfolio of patents just as valid as those they hold over CDMA. It sucks, but there you have it.

WiMax Open Patent Alliance
Bruce Perens
Tue Jun 10 09:49:27 -0700 2008
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I think the word "Open" is a gross overstatement here.

WiMax Open Patent Alliance
Charles E Hill
Tue Jun 10 11:05:47 -0700 2008
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It is a buzzword that has, as I'm sure you are aware, been co-opted my the marketing droids.

I think they mean "RAND Pool", though I'm not interested enough to read the PDF.

 

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