... and it was called CDMA2000, a proprietary open standard.
OTOH, they could not create or commercialize the collaborative open comittee-based UTRA (WCDMA) technology and standards without the patented IP (declared to ETSI/ARIB/3GPP as essential but eventually needing to be adjudicated or agreed to be such) of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, NEC, Hitachi & Mitsubishi (Renesas), Matsushita, Siemens, DoCoMo, IntedDigital, et al, and were forced to agree to license their own IP to others on FRAND terms.
I think those comments are essentially in agreement with my statement that Qualcomm had the ability to create a 3G CDMA standard while Nokia and Ericsson did not. Of course, Qualcomm took the risk that the ITU would go with a non-CDMA standard or that they would have to spend years in court trying to get a resolution. OTOH, if Ericsson had gone down a non-CDMA path they took the risk that a major GSM carrier could have gone down the CDMA evolutionary path.
Qualcomm wanted a converged standard and was willing to reduce their royalty rate to get it.
Ericsson wanted to deploy the version of WCDMA that they had already developed.
In the end, the compromise gave Qualcomm the fully royalty rate and gave Ericsson their version of WCDMA (chiprate, non-GPS, etc...).
Ericsson could have gotten the 3% royalty rate that they are now looking for, alll they had to do was change the chip rate, use GPS, and agree to the rest of the five principles.
Unless Qualcomm gives me a good explanation, I'll agree that their licensing techniques look discriminatory, but I dont think that they violate the fair and reasonable standard. The royalty rate was the product of a compromise on the converged standard.
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