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From the December 14, 1998 issue of Wireless Week
ITU Issues Warning
Vendors Must Resolve IPR Issues
By Daniel Pruzin
GENEVA--The International Telecommunication Union last week warned Ericsson Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. to resolve their
differences over intellectual property claims on radio transmission technologies--or risk seeing the two standards disqualified for
consideration as a global third-generation standard.
The ITU is now trying to draw up an "umbrella standard" for 3G systems that would allow for global mobile roaming and
worldwide interoperability between landline and wireless networks. ITU officials have said the final choice is expected to
include several compatible standards because no single technology will be the best under all operating environments.
Sixteen terrestrial radio and satellite standards have been submitted to the ITU by various industry groups worldwide as
possible third-generation norms. To be considered, however, all intellectual property rights claims on submissions must either
be waived or licensed on a fair and nondiscriminatory basis.
Both Stockholm, Sweden-based Ericsson and Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego submitted statements to the ITU last fall claiming
patents or pending patents on technologies used in both wideband code division multiple access and cdma2000. But
Qualcomm surprised the industry by announcing that it was unwilling to either waive or license its intellectual property rights on
W-CDMA unless three demands were met regarding the selection of the 3G standard.
Qualcomm's demands were that a single, converged worldwide CDMA standard should be selected as the new 3G standard;
that the new standard must be backward-compatible with existing second-generation standards; and that disputes on
technological points "should be resolved by selecting the proposal that either is demonstrably superior ... [or] most compatible
with existing technologies."
Ericsson earlier told the ITU that it was willing to license its patents on both W-CDMA and cdma2000 but only on the basis of
reciprocity. "As long as Qualcomm doesn't offer IP rights, we won't offer ours," said Ericsson Vice President Ake Persson.
The Qualcomm demands reflect fears among the U.S. industry that the European Union is trying to impose the UMTS
terrestrial radio access standard as both a regional and global norm to protect its domestic manufacturers. UTRA, developed
by Ericsson based on W-CDMA technology, was adopted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute as the
successor to global system for mobile communications.
The day after ITU's comments, Ericsson announced its willingness to compromise on the development of 3G by lowering its
standard's chip rate from 4.096 megabits per second to 3.84 Mbps to ensure compatibility with other new and existing norms
(see accompanying story on Page 1).
UTRA opponents accused ETSI at a congressional hearing last July of adopting the standard based on political rather than
technical considerations and of creating a technical barrier to trade by deliberately making UTRA incompatible with most
existing standards. U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky last October accused the EU of trying to shut U.S. mobile
firms out of the market by adopting an exclusionary standard that would make it prohibitively expensive for companies using
other standards to sell and operate their products in Europe.
The ITU wants to make a decision on the 3G "umbrella standard" by March. If the IPR stalemate is not resolved by the end of
the year, the organization warned, it may be obliged to reject a half-dozen CDMA-based submissions, including cdma2000
and UTRA as well as proposals from the U.S.-based Telecommunications Industry Association's T1P1 Group for W-CDMA
North America, Japan's Association of Radio Industries and Businesses for W-CDMA and South Korea's
Telecommunications Technology Association for Global CDMA II.
"The ITU is concerned that a 'virtual holy war' [between rival firms] can well mark the end of a dream: the dream for
consumers to have truly 'anywhere, anytime communication across networks, across frontiers, across technologies for personal
access to information age services,' the organization said in its Dec. 7 statement. |
