Intel spearheads Open Patent Alliance for Wimax

WIMAX IS KEY TO INTEL'S vision of the future. It will even share technlogy with its enemies to get the vibes off the ground.

Now, five Wimax bigshots, including Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Samsung Electronics, and Sprint Nextel will join Chipzilla in its Open Patent Alliance (OPA) which claims to want to resolve the various intellectual property issues as they arise.

Intel’s press release notes that the OPA has plans to set up some kind of independent third party "patent referee", to deal with the thorny task of evaluating submitted patents and deciding just how critical they really are to the Wimax standard.

The chip giant also points out that OPA’s goal is to "advance a competitive and open intellectual property rights model, thus stimulating a larger WiMAX industry that supports innovation through broader choice and lower equipment and service costs for WiMAX technology, devices and applications globally". Competitive? Intel?

Purportedly, between six and nine more companies are all set to join Intel’s band of merry men, but those are unlikely to include Intel’s Wimax nemeses including Qualcomm, the Vole, L.M. Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Google, Nortel Networks, Telefon and Time Warner Cable.

The absence of Qualcomm in particular is thought to be significant as it was mainly due to the raging rows between the firm and Nokia which led others to see a necessity for an organisation like OPA. Also, there are rumours that Qualcomm has a fair few 4G standard patents up its sleeve already, which would make it rather disadvantageous for the company to join its rivals in such an alliance.

Wimax has still yet to really wow the world. All the hype and bluster seems to have boiled down to patchy deployment mainly in rural areas. But last months Sprint/Clearwire hookup could mean that Wimax deployment on a larger scale is just around the corner.

Still, Intel is hedging its bets and noted in its press release that whilst the “OPA initially will focus its efforts on the Wimax standard, it may work with other industry groups in the future". µ

See Also
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Intel splashes Wimax cash in Asia

Taiwan signs WiMax deal with Intel

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