Nokia, NSN and Huawei strike wireless patent deal

Kit vendor Nokia Siemens Networks and its Finnish parent Nokia have struck a patent licensing agreement with Chinese manufacturer Huawei.

On Monday, the firms said that the deal covers all standards essential patents relating to GSM, WCDMA, CDMA2000, optical networking, datacom and WiMAX in mobile devices, infrastructure and services.

Ilkka Rahnasto, VP of Intellectual Property rights at Nokia said that Huawei is the thirty fifth company to license Nokia patents, and said the agreement, “Demonstrates how companies can license intellectual property in a way that encourages industry innovation and fosters a healthy IPR environment.”

Nokia and NSN were among a group of heavy hitters that announced a mutual commitment to a framework for establishing predictable and more transparent costs for licensing intellectual property on future technologies earlier this year.

Interestingly though, Nokia, NSN and Huawei were not involved in the creation of a WiMAX patent pool in the summer.

The basic premise of both the LTE and WiMAX patent frameworks is to encourage greater product differentiation and interoperability, as well as lower and more predictable cost structures. But the continuation of such deals between parties outside of the respective patent pools seems to deviate from this intention.