Clark, You are right that Interdigital current offering of B-CDMA is for fixed WLL only. It is also no secret that the B-CDMA consortium ( Interdigital/Samsung/Siemens and Alcatel ) have said fixed at first then neighborhood roaming and eventually full mobility.
These are some words from the Nokia/Interdigital news release .
"Nokia is committed to furthering the development of third generation technologies, which will herald the era of a true Wireless Information Society. In addition to Nokia's own core development of third generation, we place great emphasis on additional R&D, including co-operation with key industry players," said Ahti Väisänen, Vice President, Third Generation Technology, Nokia Mobile Phones. "Nokia believes that its work with InterDigital over the next several years will complement its own development of third generation products," he said.
Nokia has been supporting the W-CDMA effort proposed by ERICY which we know isn't complimentary to IS-95. We also know the Q claims they own the gateway to W-CDMA and are prepared to defend that IPR. What is interesting is that Siemens and Alcatel have never backed the W-CDMA proposal and now Nokia seeks help in their 3G effort.
It has been said that W-CDMA and B-CDMA are mirrored technologies but the Q has never made a statement about owning the gateway to B-CDMA. Could B-CDMA , if it were mobile , be a work around the Q's IPR ?
From the SEC filing you provided this was said "InterDigital does not believe that it will be necessary to use any of Qualcomm's royalty-bearing or non-licensed patents in its B-CDMA system." Three months ago the inventor (Dr. Schilling) who sold his B-CDMA patents to IDC made the same comments to me.
It will be interesting in the future to see how things work out. I can't imagine all these companies paying Interdigital royalties to buy into a court case. The legal departments of these huge companies must have seen something valid to ok those licensing agreements. |
