Comment by whatever1
14 hours ago
Remember when they were telling us how important the 5G race was and how critical was for the US to lead it?
And now they are just giving it away ?
14 hours ago
Remember when they were telling us how important the 5G race was and how critical was for the US to lead it?
And now they are just giving it away ?
I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.
To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.
I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.
https://insights.greyb.com/5g-patent-landscape/
Huawei gets a lot of research output from its many Canadian Research and Development centres
HN is enamored with the reddit-style of thought that China can only ever steal from Western research.
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how does them partnering with some Canadian R&D facilities contradict anything in GP's post? They also have a ton of R&D in Sweden, Russia, Brazil, Japan, etc. Their largest R&D center outside of China is actually India
Huawei 20% of its annual revenue back into R&D
Like nortel?
what are you implying here ??? they steal it from Canada RnD ??
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Are you saying Huawei will collapse if their Canadian R&D centers shutdown?
The alternative would be trying to file court cases outside the US for Qualcomm, which is where Huawei does most of its business and infringing.
There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.
Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.
That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.
>Huawei and Apple both ......
Surprisingly, the only one standing with Apple during the case of Qualcomm vs Apple was not Nokia, Ericsson or other telecom giant, but Huawei.
They're not giving it away, rather they're essentially forming a patent oligopoly. Huawei and Qualcomm together hold the bulk of patents for 5G. It's of no value to them to try to litigate against each other. Here they're getting a cross-licensing deal that will solidify their patent licensing wall/revenues.
Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.
No corporations would enter an agreement that is pro-competition, doesn’t make sense. That’s where government needs to step up and provide some value
It's a hard area for the government to navigate because IP is designed to confer monopoly power. As long as Qualcomm walks a careful line on licensing costs/behaviour, they probably think the risk of being the target of antitrust sanctions is limited or manageable.
Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though.
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You are the government. How are you planning to step up?
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Asking Gemini it seems their patents covers about 25% of the number of applicable patents, behind them is Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia.
No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years.
AFAIK, a lot of the Ericsson and Nokia patents are legacy. Companies still need to license them, but they're not targeted at the latest generation of 5G polar codes, MIMO OFDM implementations, etc. Not sure about Samsung.
Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth.
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> And now they are just giving it away ?
That's now how standards work - to become 5g the tech needs to be implementable by everyone at a FRAND cost (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Sharing patents just means Qualcomm and Huawei won't bill each other.
Huawei is a massive R&D company - I'm sure they're contributing as much as Qualcomm
I don't understand how standards are allowed to be patent encumbered - I get it they aren't really, but more often than not (like with the Oracle vs Google Java lawsuit) there's just one possible and obvious way to implement patents thats both efficient and correct.
For example in telco, error correcting codes are often designed in a way, that there's an algorithm that can turn the logic into a netlist.
I dont't like patent-encumbered standards neither, but I guess the idea is that developing a technology (which will be turned into a standard) is expensive, so the people (companies really) that do it should get paid for it. The more recent mobile standards really seem to be quite sophisticated technologies.
It's not like the standards have official legal status. You're allowed to develop your own mobile network technology that isn't 5G and doesn't infringe any patents - the government isn't saying that only 5G can be 5G, so it's a theoretically fair playing ground.
In this case they literally are - if you broadcast in the 5G spectrum, you better have your devices certified, otherwise the local broadcasting authority (which would be the FCC in the US) will ruin your day.
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Huawei has been leading in 5G deployments until US decides him and his allies cannot be friends with Huawei.
Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.
Leading in 5G deployments yet cannot make a 5G phone?
Nokia and Ericsson is leading telecommunications without making 5G phones.
I'm not talking about the company which makes "Nokia Phones". I'm talking about Nokia the infrastructure company.
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HUAWEI Mate 20 X 5G was launched in 2019, so what exactly are you referencing here?
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?
They've been making their own 5g phones since 2023 (mate 60)
I think this is the other way around.
The point is that this allows QC to sell chips in China without royalty.
The US will never lead 5G because many key patents there are owned by Huawei. Same for 6G. They're just now acknowledging reality.
The US sanctions itself out of the game. I m afraid if the trend continues, it may sanction itself out of the rest of the world.
maybe 6g is on the way and they don't care about 5g anymore.
Everyone else wrote the 5G specs but Huawei built the hardware.
Nortel 2.0.
Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.
Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.