LTE Intellectual Property Rights

Patent disputes are constantly in the papers recently and it seems IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) are big business as shown recently by the acquisition of the Motorola patent portfolio by Google and the Nortel one by the Apple/Microsoft led consortium.

I thought it would be quite interesting then to see how the emerging mobile technology of the future, LTE, looks from a patent perspective and which companies will benefit from its widespread adoption. It is also interesting to see how it compares with WCDMA.

Looking at the two graphs, the big telecoms players are still present with Nokia being worse off with a 50% reduction in the number of patents it holds in LTE. A few new entrants are present, notably ZTE and LG.

One thing to note, is that although the graphs show how the number of patents are distributed among the companies it does not show which ones are worth more money than others. So it is difficult to say if company Y is better off than company X.