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To: Raymond who wrote (17124)	10/25/1998 8:57:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 152472

RE: Ericsson first to file That is about as interesting in the US as the age of the inventor, isn't it?

To: Raymond who wrote (17124)	10/25/1998 11:24:00 AM
From: JGoren	Respond to of 152472

On the IPR issue, I think you have made a great point. When a company licenses from Qualcomm, its royalty rate is "high" because it is getting a whole package of licenses for cdma. Otherwise, it must go through the hassle of entering many licenses for small amounts that will add up and then maybe have to develop their own technology to fill the wholes or avoid paying a license fee for some things. The cost of package licensing may be large relatively in absolute terms but when you look at the efficiency of the package and the cost of getting many licenses, it makes sense: the company immediately can get into the cdma business.

To: Raymond who wrote (17124)	10/25/1998 1:17:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 152472

Raymond - Good response. However some issues: Now Ericsson has no right to their IPR:s on soft handoff because the solution is obvious.I can say the same thing about for QCOM:s method of doing power regulation for example. Yes and no. While it is true that the 'claims' for Qualcomm's power control handoff (patent #5603096) are pretty broad, they are still not as broad as those for Ericsson's handoff, nor are they as obvious. But even more importantly, the details of the write-up actually give a whole host of particular examples of the method of power control. If you have been reading my past posts, this is exactly the kind of advantage that comes of being in the field by yourself for a long time. Qualcomm may not be able to enforce the claims to their full extent, but they have probably covered the ground pretty well with the detailed 'claims' and those are absolutely protectable as would be most combinations of them. Suffice it to say that Qualcomm really knows how to write a good patent! You don't need to be a Nobel prize winner to come up with that method for the closed loop power regualtion. Luckily for our continued innovation as a society this isn't required. Let's say that Ericsson came up with the idea that let's keep the old channel while connecting to the new one and with this you could get a macrodiversity effect I see that as a new concept and it has nothing to with CDMA specifics. Well, first this assumes Ericsson can sneak past the non-obvious provision of patent law which I think is going to be all but impossible. But lets assume that they do, then your argument depends on the definition of 'channel', and since Ericsson did not redefine it in the patent they must use the standard definition as it would be known to most of the people 'knowledgable in the art' at the time of the patent filing. Even today, with the prevalence of CDMA, the word channel is at best a fuzzy concept. For instance, my book on cell systems has the sentence "The forward CDMA channel consists of a pilot channel, a synchronization channel, up to seven paging channels, and up to 63 forward channels." Note the first use - they mean the whole carrier. And in a later sentence it refers to the message channels as 'sub-channels'. But I'll concede that this is a debate is inherently a weaker argument against Ericsson than the first one (it is way too broad). Gregg said that a company wanting to start up a complete design of a GSM system would need to pay 20%.That might be correct I don't know .But you can't compare licensing fees for an airinterface with a whole system.IS-95 is an airinterface where GSM is a complete cellular system.What is the cost to start from scratch to build a IS-95 system. Good point. It would be interesting to know the answer. Clark

To: Raymond who wrote (17124)	10/25/1998 2:36:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Raymond - A follow-up to my previous post on the definition of 'channel', another quote from my book on cell systems: "Unlike channelized wireless systems that assign different radio channels during handoff (called a hard handoff), spread spectrum mobiles share the same channel in every cell. Thus, the term handoff does not mean a physical change in the assigned channel, but rather that a different base station handles the radio communication task." Pretty clearly they equate channel to frequency. I am sure you can find some other implicit definitions, but my point is only that it is going to be a tough sell for Ericsson - especially since I suspect that at the time of the filing (when CDMA was less prevalent), the definition of channel was much more closely associated with frequency. Clark