GSM/GRPS Royalties?

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nearly_blind@yahoo.com - 29 Dec 2005 14:15 GMT

I've seen figures of 20-30% total cost for handsets are royalties
(to Motorola, Nokia, Ericson, siemens, etc).
Is this 20-30% of retail or manufacturing cost?
Anyone know the royalty cost for base-stations?
My specific interest is actually a base-station simulator
that tests handsets. The final pricing will be ~500K / unit?
What royalties would be required (I hope not 100-150K, 20-30%).
thanks,
8631000

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matt weber - 29 Dec 2005 22:40 GMT

>I've seen figures of 20-30% total cost for handsets are royalties
>(to Motorola, Nokia, Ericson, siemens, etc).
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
>thanks,
>8631000

Royalties make up a sizeable portion of CDMA phone costs, however
there are no patents on GSM technology as such . If you want to use a
technique, or a chip that someone else developed to implement a GSM
phone that is your choice to license, but GSM as such has no patents,
i.e.you can build a GSM phone without licensing a single patent.
However the underlying technology of CDMA is patented, so all CDMA
phones and equipment pays royalties to QUALCOMM.

The USA (read QUALCOMM) was furious when the International community
selected a CDMA technology for UMTS that did NOT use any of the
QUALCOMM patents. I guess QUALCOMM figured they were entitled to force
people to use their patents...

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nearly_blind@yahoo.com - 30 Dec 2005 21:48 GMT

Thanks for the response, but I'm 100% sure that is not case.
I could list a bunch of reference but you can just search
for [gsm royalties handset] in Google.

Royalites make up a big percentage of GSM phones too but
the European companies don't complain (Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens)
about them since most the royalties are going to them instead of
Qualcomm
(actually Qualcomm has claims on GSM as well, in fact there's been news
this week of a dispute between Nokia and Qualcomm over these).

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matt weber - 04 Jan 2006 09:12 GMT

>Thanks for the response, but I'm 100% sure that is not case.
>I could list a bunch of reference but you can just search
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
>(actually Qualcomm has claims on GSM as well, in fact there's been news
>this week of a dispute between Nokia and Qualcomm over these).

As I pointed out, there are GSM patents on how various things can be
done, and many companies have patented the ideas in chips, however
unlike CDMA, the GSM technology per see is not patented, i.e. you
cannot build a CDMA phone without licensing QUALCOMM patents, you can
however build a GSM phone without using a single patent.

The fact that it for commercial reasons it may be attractive to
license various patents in a GSM phone does not negate the fact that
none are actually necessary.

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