<the "official" position for a long time was that they were not sure
the patents were required to implement DMT.>
Of course, you are refering specifically to the ANSI standard DMT functionality (which includes tone-swapping). One can certainly implement non-standard DMT w/o tone-swapping, and the question seemed to be, could Aware (or others) achieve ANSI functionality without licensing Amati's patented tone-swapping algorithm. With this licensing, the question may remain unanswered - but still perhaps worth further consideration.
Orckit claims ANSI functionality and has not licensed from Amati. Have they figured out a way to achieve ANSI functionality w/o infringing on Amati's patented tone-swapping algorithms? If not, will they license at some point, or will they simply play the international patents game?
Could Aware (and others) eventually have figured a way to achieve this functionality w/o licensing? Possibly. But perhaps they decided it wasn't worth the cost, instead deciding to license. And/or perhaps Amati got more reasonable with their pricing, and as your article points out, there was a win-win with cross licensing that made it work for all parties. Interesting that Aware will be implementing the tone-swapping option.
Perhaps the more poignant question is, since ADSL (and ANSI's standard for it) is continuing to evolve, and new chips and designs are continually forthcoming, will the Amati tone-swapping algorithm still be an essential component to the ANSI DMT standard (or the market standard) in 1999, say?
But I agree that this (ADI license) does seem good for the ADSL field going forward.
Steve |
