Nortel patent sale fuels uncertainty over LTE intellectual property Apple, Nokia and Google are all expected to bid for Nortel’s huge patents hoard. The winner could help decide the licensing structures for LTE. LTE deployments and trials may be stacking up, but one significant aspect remains fraught with uncertainty – the patent position. In previous generations of mobile technology, …
The basic problem with LTE is that noone yet knows how valuable each of its bits will be. One can run all of the LTE core with a non-LTE access layer as well as the LTE access layer without any of the VAS tail and a long list of permutations in-between. To make it all even more confusing it may be possible for standard devices to work perfectly fine on a network that does not comply to the standard for its own services and vice versa. C'est la vie - this is the price you pay for "requisitioning" IPv6 as your primary transport layer.
That is what is different from "mobile as we known it". It is the main reason why IPR in LTE is not settled and this is not likely to change until the market decides on the success (or failure) of the service tail, 3GPP prescribed core network design and a few other bits and pieces.
That is likely to be a very protracted and painful affair with lots of "patents at dawn" in the process.
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