Cyber Creative Institute Co. Ltd.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents
declared to ETSI
Version 1.0

December 2011

Table of contents
1.Objectives. .............................................................................................................................. 1
2. Survey results ........................................................................................................................ 3
2.1Derivation of patents subject to survey .................................................................................. 3
2.2Application trends ................................................................................................................. 5(1) Numbers of patents declared by individual companies ........................................................... 5(2) Breakdown by the year of application .................................................................................... 8(3) Breakdown by company and application year ......................................................................... 9(4) Breakdown by application country ....................................................................................... 10(5) Breakdown by company and application country ................................................................... 122.3Evaluation of essentiality to standards ................................................................................. 14(1) Evaluation method ............................................................................................................... 14(2) Selection of patents for evaluation ....................................................................................... 16(3) Essentiality evaluation results ............................................................................................ 18(4) Evaluation results for each company .................................................................................... 19
3. Estimation of numbers of “essential” patents ......................................................................... 22
4. Summary .............................................................................................................................. 25
References ................................................................................................................................ 27
Appendix 1- ........................................................................................................................... 28

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents
declared to ETSI
Version 1.0

1 Objectives
In Japan, an instance of LTE (Long Term Evolution) services 1 was launched in December,
2010, by NTT DOCOMO under the name of Xi (pronounced “Crossy”) to pave the way to the
4 t h generation mobile communication services, which will succeed the 3 r d generation
services that are currently widely deployed.
In implementing the 3 r d generation mobile communication systems, different technicalstandards, such as W-CDMA and cdma2000, have been adopted by different carriers,
resulting in incompatibility problems. The deployment of LTE is expected to remedy suchproblems by enforcing a single international standard.
Standardization of LTE, as was the case with that of W-CDMA, has been being carriedout in 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project), an international standards
development project organized by the standards developing organizations in various
countries, such as ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in Europe and
ARIB (Association of Radio Industries and Businesses) in Japan. During the course of theirstandardization activities, telecom companies may acquire related patents. In order for apatented technology to be adopted in a standard, its holder has to declare to theorganizations in each country its willingness to make licenses available to all third parties
under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms 2 . The patents (including
patent applications) to be studied in this survey are those declared to ETSI as being
essential to LTE.
Although ETSI is a European standards developing organization, not only European
companies but many non-European ones have declared LTE-essential patents to ETSI,
because Europe has long been a large telecom market and has fostered many prominent
Trial/commercial LTE services have been launched or are planned by Telia Sonera (inDecember, 2009), NTT DOCOMO (in December, 2010), Vodafone (in 2010), Verizon Wireless(in 2010), Softbank(after 2011), AT&T (in 2011), Telecom Italia (in 2011~2012), KDDI (in2012), T-Mobile (in2012) and Orange (in 2012)..
2 When declaring an essential patent to standards developing organizations such as ETSIor ARIB, the holder is requested to choose one of the following three licensing options:(1) Grant licenses free of charge (or disclaim patent rights)(2) Grant licenses to other parties on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms andconditions.
(3) Others (choose neither of the above)
The second option above is called the FRAND condition.
1

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11. Objectives
companies. As such, it should be reasonable to regard the number of LTE-essential patents,
declared to ETSI by each company, as one of important indicators of the “patenting power”
of that company.
In order to evaluate true “patenting power”, the simple count of LTE-essential patents,
as have been declared to and listed by ETSI, is not a good measure, due to the following two
reasons.
-

Duplicate count of patents
A single invention may appear multiple times in the declaration list, as separate
patents, if the following types of applications are issued: provisional applications in the
U.S., divisional applications, or applications to foreign countries. With divisional
applications, there may be such cases that individual applications should be counted
separately provided that the scopes of the applications are different from each other, but, inmost cases, it is more appropriate to count them as a single patent family.
-

Difference in declaration policy of each company
Decision whether a particular patent is essential or not is solely at a company’s
discretion. ETSI does not confirm or deny that the declared patents are, in fact, essential or
potentially essential. As a result, patents of similar importance may be declared by one
company but not by another, resulting in considerable difference in the number of thedeclarations made by each company.
Based on these observations, this survey aims at estimating the number of truly“essential” patents held by each company, taking the following processes:- to identify effective number of declared patents by grouping related patents as a family toremove duplications from the declared patent list,- to derive the number of “essential” patents by determining the relevance of each declaredpatent to the standards, applying a common evaluation criteria.

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22.Survey results

2 Survey results
2.1 Derivation of patents subject to survey
The list of essential, or potentially essential, IPRs as declared to ETSI (hereinafterreferred to as “original list”) was obtained from the ETSI website 3 in July, 2011. The
beginning part of this list is cited in Appendix 1.
The original list simply lists the information notified by companies as provided. As aresult, the numbering format for the patents is not consistent. This fact introduces such
deficiencies: a group of patents, that are derived from a single invention or applied indifferent countries, are listed as separate entities; or undisclosed patents, such asprovisional applications 4 in the U.S., are also included in the list. Therefore, it is difficult
to meaningfully compare the number of patents held by each company based on the originallist.
To overcome these deficiencies, we have sorted out the original list so that we can countthe effective number of patents (including patent applications 5 ) by counting them on apatent family-basis. This approach makes it possible to count the number of declaredpatents without being affected by such procedural factors as applications to foreigncountries, divisional applications 6 or continuation applications 7 .
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_sr/000300_000399/000314/
A “provisional application” is an application made on the assumption that a formal patentapplication will be made at a later time. It was introduced in the U.S. in 1995 in order toentitle inventors to the right of priority for national patent. In the provisional application
system, formal patent claims are not required because there is no intention to claim any
patent rights. In order to mature it into an issued patent the applicant must file or request
a formal patent application within one year. Otherwise, the provisional application isconsidered to have been abandoned.
5 Not only registered patents but also patent applications are studied in this survey to set
the proper scope of work. In a legal sense, “patents”, as stated in the title of this paper,
legally refer only to those already registered.
6 A “divisional application” refers to an application where a parent application describing
more than one invention is split into one or more applications each claiming only a single
invention. By utilizing this procedure the applicant can obtain rights for each divisional
application which may facilitate the quicker granting of patent rights for certain
applications.
7 A "continuation application" refers to an application that is based on an original patentapplication (often referred to as a parent application), and has the same priority date andspecification as the parent. Continuation applications are often filed so that an applicant
may pursue claims to inventions that were disclosed but not allowed in the parent
application or may want to pursue additional claims to the parent application. It is a US
specific system where the filing date of the parent application can be kept provided that no
additional statements are made. In Japanese patent system, this is included in thedivisional application category.
3
4

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2.Survey results
Specifically, patents to be surveyed have been obtained by processing the original list in
the following manner:(a) Deleting patents that do not contain the term “LTE” in the “Essential to projects”
column.
(b) Tidying up patents having the same application number or publication number.
(c) Deleting patents that were not disclosed as of August, 2011.
(d) Identifying patent families using a commercial patent database for each patent thatsurvived the above processes of (a) to (c).
(e) Counting the patents belonging to the same family as one patent.
PatBase 8 , which is a commercial patent database developed jointly by RWS and Minesoft,was used for the above processing 9 . As the result, 2,999 patents, or patent families to be
exact, have been identified.

http://www.rws.com/EN/PatBase.html
http://www.iac-academy.co.jp/patbase/index.html
9 Patents in PatBase having a common Patent Family Number and a common priority
number (including the VLF number), associated with the earliest priority date, areconsidered to belong to a same patent family, and therefore they were grouped into one.
VLF (Very Large Family) number refers to the identification number given to a certain
portion of a large family (with more than 130 patents) to indicate that it is a portion of thefamily that has been split.
8

PatBase:

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2.Survey results
2.2 Application trends(1) Numbers of patents declared by individual companies
The numbers of patents (counted on a patent-family-basis; the same applies to thefollowing figures) declared by individual companies on a declaration-year-basis are shownin Figure 1. Years of declaration were derived from the “Declaration Dates” column in theoriginal list. The names of the companies making the declarations were taken from the“Declaring Companies” column and translated to effective names, as shown in Table 1.
Related company names were mapped to a common effective name. There were a total of 32
companies that made declarations.
Some of the companies started to make declarations as early as 2007 when thestandards were still being developed. However, on the whole, the number of declaring
companies started to rise after 2009 when specifications were fixed and the developmental
work for commercialization got into full swing, and the numbers of patents declared by eachcompany also sharply increased. The reason behind this is that companies regard thenumber of declarations as an index indicating their R&D and IPR powers related to LTE,and see the declared patent database as good means to appeal their power to the public.
This benefit is considered to compensate the drawback that a company has to grant FRAND
terms to standards developing organizations in order for a patented technology to be usedin the implementation of a standard. Companies are promoting patent declarations having
the strategic intention of making most of their IPR in mind.

500
450

441

400
350
300
250
200
150
100

310
295
294
241
230
225
217

2011
2010
2009

169

2008

116
99

2007
Prior to 2006

73
46 45

3430
25 22 2050

15 1411 8 6

3 3 2 1 1 1 1 1

0

Figure 1 – Declared numbers of patents by company

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2.Survey results
Table 1 – Names of declaring companies and their aggregate names

Declaring company

Aggregate nameCountryabbreviation

ALCATEL-LUCENT

Alcatel-Lucent

FR

Andrew LLC

Andrew LLC

US

AT&T

AT&T

US

DeutscheTelekomDE

Deutsche Telekom AG
Telekom Deutschland GmbH
Ericsson AB

Ericsson

SE

ETRI

ETRI

KR

Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

FreescaleUS

Gemplus SA

Gemplus

FR

HP

FR

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

HuaweiCN

iCODING Technology Inc.

iCODINGUSINFINEON TECHNOLOGIESInfineon

DE

InterDigitalUS

IPR Licensing Inc.

IPR Licensing

US

Koninklijke KPN N.V.

Koninklijke

NL

LG Electronics Inc.

LG

KR

Marvell Switzerland S.A.R.L

MarvellBM

MotorolaUS

NEC Corporation

NEC

JP

NOKIA Corporation

Nokia Corp

FI

Hewlett-Packard,

CentredeCompetences

FranceInterDigital Technology Corp.
InterDigital Patent Holdings Inc.

Motorola Mobility Inc.
MOTOROLA Inc

Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG

Nokia Siemens

FI

Nortel Networks Ltd

NortelCA

NTT DOCOMO, INC

NTT DOCOMO

JP

Panasonic Corporation

Panasonic

JP

Qualcomm Incorporated

Qualcomm

US

Samsung Electronics Co, LTD

SamsungKR

Sharp Corporation

Sharp

JP

Siemens AG

Siemens

DE

Sony Corporation

Sony

JP

Texas Instruments Inc.

TI

US

VoiceAge Corporation

VoiceAgeCNZTE Corporation
ZTE
CNNB) Country name is that where the company’s head office is located. Abbreviations are as follows:
BM: BERMUDA
CN: CHINA
CA: CANADA
DE: GERMANY
FR: FRANCE
FI: FINLAND
JP: JAPAN
KR: KOREA
NL:NETHERLANDS
US:UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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2.Survey results
Figure 2 is a pie chart showing the percentages of declared patents of companies listed
in Figure 1. In order to avoid the chart becoming crowded, eight companies with less thanfour declarations, namely IPR Licensing, VoiceAge, Infineon, AT&T, Gemplus, HP, iCODING
and Koninklijke, have been grouped into “Others.”
Qualcomm has the maximum percentage (about 15%) and is followed by Ericsson,
InterDigital and Samsung. The figure shows that declarations are not just limited to a few
particular companies but many other companies, including Asian companies such as
Samsung, ZTE, Huawei, NTT DOCOMO and Panasonic, have also made comparatively
similar numbers of declarations.
TI
ETRI
1.0% 0.8%

NEC
0.7%

Siemens
0.7%

Nortel1.1%

SonyMarvell Andrew LLC
0.5% Freescale 0.4%
DeutscheTelekom
0.3%
0.5%
0.2%
Others0.4%

Nokia Siemens
1.5%
Alcatel‐Lucent
Sharp
1.5%
Panasonic
2.4%
3.3%
LG
3.9%

Qualcomm
14.7%
Ericsson
10.3%

NTT DOCOMO
5.6%
Huawei
7.2%
Nokia Corp
ZTE
7.5%
7.7%

InterDigital
9.8%
Samsung
9.8%Motorola
8.0%

Total: 2,999 families

Figure 2 - Percentages of declared patents by company

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2.Survey results(2) Breakdown by the year of application
Figure 3 shows the transition in the numbers of declared patents on an application-yearbasis. The horizontal axis shows the earliest priority year (i.e. the year in which theapplication of particular invention was filed for the first time, irrespective of the country it
was filed) and the vertical axis shows the number of families.
(a) Many patents that are filed after 2005, the year when standardization activities of LTE
began, have been declared. Especially, those that were filed between 2006 and 2008
were significant. This period coincides with the time when LTE specifications had been
being developed before the first version of LTE standards were released in March, 2008.
(b) The number of declared patents filed in around 1999 is not negligible. The reason forthis is considered to be the fact that there are common features between the LTE
standards and the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) standards that
had been studied earlier as 3 r d generation mobile communication systems.
(c) Declaration of patents that were filed in 2010 are few because this survey covers
patents disclosed as of August 2011 - in other words, patents whose earliest priority
date is earlier than February 2010 1 0 .

Figure 3 – Breakdown of declared patents by year of application

Laying open of application: Patents are published 18 months after their applications is
filed.

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2.Survey results(3) Breakdown by company and application year
Figure 4 shows the number of declared patents by company on an application year-basis.
The horizontal axis shows the earliest priority year and the horizontal axis shows thenames of the declaring companies. The circle size is proportional to the number of patentfamilies.
The companies can be roughly grouped into four categories:(a) Companies that have declared patents whose applications were made over many
years, from the 1990’s to the present: Qualcomm, Ericsson, InterDigital, Motorola
and Nokia(b) Companies that have declared patents whose applications were made mainly after
2005, the year when LTE standardization work began: ZTE, Huawei, NTT DOCOMO,
Sharp, Alcatel-Lucent, ETRI, NEC, Freescale and Marvell(c) Companies that have declared patents whose application were made prior to 2005
but not afterwards: Nortel, Siemens, Sony, IPR Licensing, Voiceage, HP, iCODING
and Koninkijke(d) None of above.

Figure 4 – Analysis of application by company and application year

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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92.Survey results(4) Breakdown by application country
Figure 5 shows the number of declared patents by application country. These numbers
are obtained by referring to 2,999 patent families in PatBase and by counting patents withthe same two-character country codes 1 1 located at the beginning of the application number.
The horizontal axis shows the application countries and the vertical axis shows the numberof patents.
There were 55 countries in which patents were filed but, due to lack of space, countries
with less than five applications have been omitted (CZ, PH, TR, GR, BG, RO, CL, EG, PE,
NL, EE, SK, HR, CH, IE and GE) 1 2 .
The result shows that US scored the largest number followed by Patent Cooperation
Treaty (WO 1 3 ), European Patent Office (EP), China (CN), Japan (JP) and Korea (KR). This
indicates that the filing of applications have been done in countries where major companies
are located as well as where big mobile communication markets exist.

Country names and their abbreviations are shown below in descending order of thenumber of applications:
US: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WO: PATENT COOPERATION TREATY
EP: EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE, CN: CHINA, JP: JAPAN,
KR: KR KOREA (REPUBLIC OF), IN: INDIA, AU: AUSTRALIA, MX: MEXICO,
AT: AUSTRIA, TW: TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA, CA: CANADA, DE: GERMANY, BR:
BRAZIL, RU: RUSSIAN FEDERATION, IL: ISRAEL, AR: ARGENTINA,
ES: SPAIN,
HK: HONG KONG,
NO: NORWAY,ZA: SOUTH AFRICA,
FI: FINLAND, GB: UNITED KINGDOM, SG: SINGAPORE, DK: DENMARK,NZ: NEW ZEALAND, PT: PORTUGAL, EA: EURASIAN PATENT OFFICE,
SE: SWEDEN, ID: INDONESIA, UA: UKRAINE, MA: MOROCCO, FR: FRANCE,
HU: HUNGARY, IT: ITALY, AP: AFRICAN REGIONAL INDUSTRIAL PROPERTYORGANIZATION, SI: SLOVENIA, CO: COLOMBIA, PL: POLAND,
1 2 CZ:CZECH REPUBLIC,
PH:THE PHILIPPINES,
TR:TURKEY,
GR:GREECE,
BG: BULGARIA,
RO: ROMANIA,
CL:CHILE,
EG:EGYPT,
PE:PERU,
NL:NETHERLANDS,
EE:ESTONIA,
SK:SLOVAKIA,
HR:CROATIA,
CH:SWITZERLAND,
IE:IRELAND,
GE:GEORGIA
1 3 A “WO patent” is an international application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty(PCT) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Making a PCT application
has the same effect as filing the same application in all PCT member countries. WO patents
are internationally unexamined patents and only the publication before examination ismade. After making the international application and then submitting the translated texts
to the patent office in the respective country, registered patent publication will be issued
after successful completion of examinations in each country.
11

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2.Survey results

Figure 5- Breakdown by country of application

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2.Survey results(5) Breakdown by company and application country
Figure 6 shows the breakdown by application country for each company. Due to lack ofspace, only those countries with no less than 100 applications are shown.
(a) Among the top ranking companies, US and European companies, such as Qualcomm,
Ericsson, InterDigital, Motorola and Nokia in particular, are filing applications
worldwide.
(b) Japanese and Korean companies’ activities are not so strong as those seen in (a) but
they are filing applications to foreign countries in a balanced manner, including BRICs.
(c) ZTE and Huawei of China file applications in a limited number of countries (CN, WO, EP
and US) and application countries are almost common for the two companies. In addition,
as noted in Section 2.3 (4), a high proportion of their applications are still pending.

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2.Survey results

Figure 6 – Breakdown by application country and company

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2.Survey results
2.3 Evaluation of essentiality to standards
Because declaration of patents is done voluntarily by each company, no indications are
made whether they are really essential in conforming to standards or they aresupplementary in the sense that they simply facilitate implementation. Furthermore, thecriteria to decide whether a particular patent is essential or not is up to each company, andthe decision is made based on the company’s own IPR strategy, to make the most of its IPR
assets. In addition to these, ETSI does not check the appropriateness of the declarations
nor evaluate the relevance of the declared patents to the standards. Due to these reasons,the numbers of patents shown in Section 2.2 do not reflect the truly “essential” patents heldby each company, and do not meet our survey purpose.
To overcome this difficulty, this survey applies a common set of criteria to see therelevance of each declared patent to standard specifications. In this way, we can derive thenumber of truly “essential” patents based on objective evaluations rather than subjective
evaluation done by applicant companies.

(1) Evaluation method(i) For each patent family, a representative patent (a patent that represents a declaredpatent family) was identified and checked against the standards.
(ii) In selecting a representative patent, Japanese patent was preferred, followed by US
patent, and EP or WO patent (in the order of preference).
(iii) If the representative patent was registered one, claims in the registered patent were
evaluated. If it was still pending 1 4 , the latest claim at the time of evaluation was used.
In the latter case, the latest claim after amendments was obtained from respective
patent information websites (in case of Japan:
http://www.ipdl.inpit.go.jp/Tokujitu/pfwj.ipdl?N0000=118).
(iv) If a patent has multiple claims, a single claim that has the broadest scope was chosen.
(v) The standards to be checked against were, in principle, the ones indicated in the“Essential to standards YES to ETSI FRAND license” column of the original list.
However, other standards were also referred to for additional information.
(vi) Regarding the versions of the standards for comparison, in principle, Release 9 (end of
March, 2010 version) was used regardless of the version indicated in the “Essential tostandards YES to ETSI FRAND license” column of the original list. Additionally,
Release 10 (end of March, 2011 version) was also used as a supplement.
(vii)
Evaluation was conducted by classifying patents into A, B and C categories
according to their essentiality. The definition of A, B and C is as follows:
A: The invention contained in the patent matches the standards.
Pending means that the application is being processed in the patent office and neither
decision nor trial decision has been reached. For instance, until a trial decision of rejection
is made, the application is pending at the patent office but, if revocation of the trial
decision is launched and the patent is in litigation, the application is not pending at thepatent office (pending litigation). Furthermore, if the trial decision of rejection iscancelled by the court decision, the application will again be pending at the patent office.

14

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2.Survey results
B: The invention contained partially matches the standards.
C: The invention contained does not match the standards.
(viii) Whether the status of the invention is mandatory or optional in the standards was
not taken into consideration.
The evaluation work was conducted by technical people, who recorded the respective
specifications in the standards and the reasoning for their evaluations. The evaluation
results of the technical people were checked with each other, on a sample basis, to assure
the quality of evaluation. Attention was paid so that each evaluator was to cover different
companies to prevent evaluation variations introduced by individual evaluators.
It must be noted, however, that 100% accuracy of the results cannot be guaranteed, due
to the intrinsic limitation introduced by the above evaluation methods and limited time
available.

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2.Survey results(2) Selection of patents for evaluation
Because of limited evaluation time available, it was not possible to evaluate all of the2,999 representative patents. So patents for evaluation were selected according to thefollowing criteria:(a) As many companies as possible are to be selected, unless their declarations weremade too late.
(b) As for companies that have made numerous declarations, around 50 patents each are
to be selected.
(c) Those patents whose specifications are written in Japanese or English are to be
selected. If this is not possible, specifications in other languages (e.g. Chinese) areused and evaluations are done based on their English abstract.
120.0

250
193

100

100.0

100100100100

Numbers evaluated

158
150

100

50

0

80.0

129124
62 59
105
97
54

60.0

57

47
82 49 45
42 44
40
40.0
33 33
33 29
53 52 4840
22 23 21
20.0
21 15
10 8
2 2 29 17 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0

Figure 7 – Numbers and percentages of patents evaluated
In Figure 7 the bar graph shows the numbers of patents selected for evaluation in the
study and the line graph shows the ratios of those to the number of declared patents madeby respective companies. The horizontal axis shows company names while the scale on theleft vertical axis shows the number of patent families and the one on the right shows theratio in percentage. In the figure, underlined numbers show the percentages and those
without underline show the number of patents that have been evaluated.
For companies listed to the left of LG, the criterion (b) has been applied and more than
50 patents have been selected. It should be noted that the percentage evaluated wassomewhat low for ZTE and Nokia, because the proportion of ZTE’s patents written in
Chinese was rather high and Nokia’s patents might be owned by NokiaSiemens as well.
Qualcomm shows a smaller percentage because it has declared a very large number of

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Percentages（ ％）200

Numbers evaluated
Percentages

2.Survey results
patents. Sharp, Marvell, Andrew LLC. DeutscheTelekom made their declarations rather lateso were omitted from the current evaluation.
The total number of patents evaluated came to 1,147, which amounted to 38.2% of thedeclared patents (2,999).

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2.Survey results(3) Essentiality evaluation results
Figure 8 shows the essentiality evaluation results for all 1,147 patents. The percentageof those scored “A”, which is considered to be really essential for the standards, was 55.4%.
Although all patents studied have been declared to be essential, a certain portion ofthem are evaluated as “B” or “C”. The main reason for this is considered to lie in the
difference in each company’s criteria for judging essentiality and its declaration policy. It is
likely that those irrelevant patents were declared essential based on the company’s IPR
strategy even though those patents may have been internally judged to be somewhat shortof being essential.

C
13.8%
B
30.8%

A
55.4%

1,147 patents

Figure 8 – Essentiality evaluation results
A: The invention contained in the patent matches the standards.
B: The invention contained partially matches the standards.
C: The invention contained does not match the standards.

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2.Survey results(4) Evaluation result for each company
Figure 9 shows the evaluation results for each company. Most of the companies havemore “A”s than “B”s or “C”s. In particular, NTT DOCOMO, ZTE, LG, Nokia Siemens andNortel have relatively high “A” ratios.

Figure 9 - Essentiality evaluation results for each company

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2.Survey results
Figure 10 shows the essentiality ratios (percentage of patents evaluated as “A” to all
the patents evaluated) for each company. The horizontal axis shows the essentiality ratio(in percentage) and the vertical axis shows the company names. Due to space limitation,companies with less than 10 declared patents for evaluation were omitted.
Companies such as ZTE, NTT DOCOMO, Nokia Siemens and LG have ratios of around
80% which are higher than the average (55.4%). One of the reasons for this is considered tobe the fact that these companies made declarations for relatively new patents, filed after
LTE standardization began.

Figure 10 - Evaluation results by company (essentiality ratio)
In considering the essentiality of the patents, it is necessary also to take into account
whether the patents under study have been already registered or not. Figure 11 shows thepercentage of registered patents to the total number of patents under evaluation for eachcompany. Only those companies with no less than 10 patents for evaluation are shown.
In Figure 11, patent counts were made by referring to the examination status of thepatents in the application country as of the survey period. Therefore, it must be noted thatthe result does not reflect the examination status as of present nor does it reflect theexamination status in those countries pertinent to ETSI declarations. For example, as
described in Section 2.3 (1)(ii), in most of the cases, examination status is derived fromJapanese patent, if a patent family includes a Japanese one, or from US patent, if thefamily does not include a Japanese one, so even for US-based Qualcomm, about 30% of theevaluations were based on the filings made in Japan. In the case where the evaluated were
PCT patents, they were treated as non-registered. With companies whose registration ratio

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

20

2.Survey results
was high, it is reasonable to assume that most of their patents have been already approved
and the evaluated score would not change; whereas with those whose registration ratio waslow, their score may degrade as their claims are examined and their scopes become
narrower.

Figure 11 –Registration ratios of patents evaluatedEvaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

21

3.Estimation of the numbers of essential patents

３･Estimation of the numbers of essential patents
The number of “essential” patents held by each company (on a patent family basis) has
been estimated by multiplying the number of declared patent families (see Table 1 or Figure1) by the essentiality ratio (Figure 10).

Sony Marvell
Alcatel‐ Siemens
ETRI 0%0%Lucent1%
Andrew
LLC
1%
1%
Nortel
TI NEC0%1%
1% 1%
Nokia Siemens
2% Sharp
Panasonic
3%

Freescale
0% DeutscheTelekom
VoiceAge0%0%2%Motorola5%

Qualcomm
14%
ZTE
12%

LG
5%

HuaweiEricsson
6%
9%
Nokia Corp
InterDigital
NTT
8%
9%
DOCOMO
8% Samsung
8%

Figure 12 – Percentages of “ essential” patents by company
The result is shown in Figure 12. For those companies (Sharp, ETRI, TI, NEC, Sony,
Marvell, Andrew LLC and DeutscheTelekom) with which essentiality ratio was not available,
because of the fact that evaluation was not conducted in this survey or the number of
evaluated patents was small, the average value of 55% has been applied.
Qualcomm has been estimated to be number one with 240 “essential” patents followed by
ZTE (189), Ericsson (159), InterDigital (149), NTT DOCOMO (142), Samsung (142) and
Huawei (105).
Regarding ZTE and Huawei, their low registration ratios (see Figure 11) suggest thatmany of their patents are still in examination phase. Thus, as was mentioned earlier, there
may be a possibility that the numbers become smaller due to shrinkage of patent claims as
the result of their patent examinations.
Based on the results above, the major features of the high score companies are

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

22

3.Estimation of the numbers of essential patentssummarized as follows:i)
Qualcomm
Qualcomm has the maximum number of declared patents. It has continuously
made declarations from as early as 2007 up to 2011 and maintains an essentiality
ratio higher than average. This makes us believe that Qualcomm is allocating
significant resources to continuously analyzing its own patents and to actively
declaring patents that have exceeded reasonable criteria. It is foreseen that theirdeclarations will further increase in the future. As a result of their globalization
efforts it is highly likely that Qualcomm will be holding many “essential” patents inmany countries.
ii)

Ericsson
Declaration dates by Ericsson are centered around 2009 and 2010. Theirregistration ratio is comparatively high and essentiality ratio is average. Because
their declared patents were filed between around 1990 and now, it is likely that
Ericsson has conducted a comprehensive analysis of their own patents at certain
stages and, during these two years, has made declarations for the patents that met
their criteria.

iii)

InterDigital
InterDigital exhibits similar tendencies to Qualcomm’s. However, it is foreseenthat the number of “essential” patents of InterDigital may not increase so much likethe case of Qualcomm, because its registration ratio is poorer than that of
Qualcomm and there were cases where a patent declared by InterDigital were
rejected in examinations.

iv)

Samsung
Samsung started to make declarations after 2008 for patents filed after 2005.
Because the patents are new, their registration ratio is still low and theiressentiality ratio is at an average level. However, because the number of declaredpatents is large, the number of their “essential” patents is also large. Their policyof actively making declarations is evident but there is a chance that the number of“essential” patents may not increase as much as expected depending on the resultsof patent examinations. Therefore, a close watch on the examination status ofSamsung’s patents is necessary.

v)

Motorola
Motorola made declarations in a lump in 2010 covering its patents filed between
1990 and 2007. It is estimated that Motorola has spent some time to make acomprehensive analysis of its patents and selected those patents to be declared.
Many of the declared patents were filed before 2005 when LTE standardization
began and almost all of the patents evaluated in this survey have been registered.

vi)

ZTE
ZTE made declarations in a lump in 2010 covering its patents filed after 2006. In

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

23

3.Estimation of the numbers of essential patents
contrast to Motorola, ZTE’s salient points are that the declaration was mademainly of those patents that were applied with LTE in mind, and that only
unregistered patents were declared. Therefore, depending on the examination
results, a certain number of the patents may become non-essential which leads us
to suggest that the estimated number of “essential” patents held by ZTE is anoverestimate, compared to those of other companies.
vii)

Nokia
Nokia exhibits almost the same tendencies as Ericsson.

viii)

Huawei
Huawei has comparatively similar tendencies to Samsung’s, but the number ofdeclared patents is smaller and consequently the number of “essential” patents issmaller as well. In addition, its ratio of registered patents is low as is the case with
ZTE.

ix)

NTT DOCOMONTT DOCOMO made notifications in 2009 and 2010 for its patents filed after 2005.
The ratio of registered patents is high despite their being new applications, andtheir essentiality ratio is very high. This means that NTT DOCOMO possesses a
relatively high number of registered “essential” patents so that, when comparedwith other companies, NTT DOCOMO needs to be given a higher rank than is
actually found in Figure 12 (i.e. 5 t h place).

x)LG
LG made notifications in a lump in 2009 for its patents filed between 1998 and2008. The high essentiality ratio suggests that they have made declarations basedon relatively strict internal evaluations on their patents.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

24

4.Summary

４・SummaryIn this survey, the number of patents for evaluation was first identified to be 2,999.
Based on these patents, studies on application trends and the essentiality of the patents
have been conducted. The main results are as follows:i)

By processing the list of essential, or potentially essential IPRs notified to ETSI
(original list) obtained from the ETSI website and grouping the declared patents into
patent families, a total of 2,999 patents were identified to be subject to this study.
This is the effective number of declared patents. The number of companies that madedeclarations was 32.

ii)

Qualcomm has the largest number of declared patents (441, 14.7%) and is followed by
Ericsson (310, 10.3％ ), InterDigital (295, 9.8％ ), Samsung (294, 9.8％ ), Motorola (241,8.0％ ) and ZTE (230, 7.7％ ). There are nine companies that have shares of more than
5% which proves that the declarations are not limited to just several major
companies but many companies are making declarations in roughly equal numbers.
The nationalities of the companies are also spread across USA, Europe and Asia in abalanced manner.

iii)

Many of the declared patents have been filed after 2005, when LTE standardization
work began. In particular, the applications filed between 2006 and 2008 are dominant,while the number of declarations made on the applications filed between 1999 and2004 are also significant.

iv)

Companies can be classified into four groups, namely, a) those who have madedeclarations for patents filed during a long period of time from the early days(around 1990) to now, b) those who have made declarations mainly for patents filed
after 2005 (the year when LTE standardization started), c) those who have madedeclarations for early applications but not for applications after 2005, and d) those
who do not fall into any of the above categories.

v)

The countries, where the applications were made, were surveyed. Qualcomm,
Ericsson, InterDigital, Motorola and Nokia are filing applications in various
countries in the world. Japanese and Korean companies are also filing applications in
BRICs and other countries in a balanced manner in addition to US and Europe.

vi)

Samples were taken from 2,999 effective patents to apply essentiality evaluation. It
has been estimated that 55% of them are “essential” patents conforming to ETSI
standards. In terms of the essentiality ratio (i.e. the ratio of “essential” patents to

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

25

4.Summary
the total number of patents declared by the subject company), ZTE, NTT DOCOMO
and Nokia Siemens have the highest scores which are over 80%.
vii)

The numbers of “essential” patents have been derived based on the numbers ofdeclared patents and the essentiality ratios. Qualcomm is estimated to have thelargest number of “essential” patents (240) followed by ZTE (189), Ericsson (159),
InterDigital (149), NTT DOCOMO (142), Samsung (142), Nokia (132) and Huawei(105). Regarding companies such as ZTE and Huawei who have many unregisteredpatents, those numbers may be reduced because of the possible decline of theessentiality ratio.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

26

References
References

1) List of essential, or potentially essential IPRs notified to ETSI
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_sr/000300_000399/000314/
2) 3GPP standards
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/41101.htm
Release8: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-8
Release9: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-9
Release10: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-10
Release11: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-11

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

27

Appendix
Appendix 1
Excerpt of ETSI site（ http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_sr/000300_000399/000314/）

ETSI IPR ONLINE DATABASE -- DISCLAIMER
IPR in ETSI deliverables
The ETSI IPR DATABASE contains IPRs, particularly patents and patent applications, which have been notified to ETSI as being essential, or potentiallyessential, to ETSI standards. Unless otherwise specified, all IPRs contained herein have been notified to ETSI, with an undertaking from the owner togrant licenses according to the terms and conditions of Article 6.1 of the ETSI IPR POLICY (Annex 6 of the Rules of Procedure).
The ETSI IPR DATABASE provides data that is based on the information received. ETSI has not checked the validity of the information, nor the relevanceof the identified patents/patent applications to the ETSI Standards and cannot confirm, or deny, that the patents/patent applications are, in fact,essential, or potentially essential. No investigation, or IPR searches, have been carried out by ETSI and therefore no guarantee can be given
concerning the existence of other IPRs which are, or may become, essential.
Potential Licensees should use the information in this database at their discretion and should contact the patent holder, for example to establish theasserted status for a disclosed patent family, prior to making a patent licensing decision.

Patent information
Application number

Publication number
0 318 033
Re. 36,309

CA19912054849
CA19922061832
DE19916031339T
DE19916032986T
DE19916032987T
DE19916033296T
DE19926029974T
DE19926032879T
DE19926032887T
EP19910102440
EP19910118741
EP19920103179
EP19960115034
EP19960115033
EP19980124813
EP19980124814
JP19910261925
JP19900042955
JP19900042956
US19910658473
US19910787596
US19920841726

5 487 128
CA2054849 C
CA2061832 C
DE69131339 T2
DE69132986 T2
DE69132987 T2
DE69133296 T2
DE69229974 T2
DE69232879 T2
DE69232887 T2
EP0443548 B1
EP0483882 B1
EP0504627 B1
EP0753841 B1
EP0755047 B1
EP0910063 B1
EP0910064 B1
JP3151874 B2
JP3194930 B2JP3256215 B2US5208862 A
US5271089 A
US5487128 A

CA19830444239
JP19820231603
JP19820231605
JP19820231606
US19830565804
EP07786577
EP20070786577
WO2007EP06931

CA1197619 A1
JP1740692 C
JP1740693 C
JP1740694 C
US4716592 A
EP2174480
EP2174480 A1
WO2009018835 A1

Title
Patent office Declaring companies
Digital cellular telecommunicaNEC Corporation
Digital cellular telecommunicaNEC Corporation
GB (UNITED KINGNEC Corporation
DE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
SE (SWEDEN)
NEC Corporation
US (UNITED STATNEC Corporation
Speech PaUS (UNITED STATNEC Corporation
CA (CANADA)
NEC Corporation
SPEECH PA
CA (CANADA)
NEC Corporation
SPEECH PA
Verfahren zDE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
Verfahren zDE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
Verfahren zDE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
SprachcodiDE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
Verfahren DE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
SprachparaDE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
Sprachkodi DE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
Speech coEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
Speech parEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
Speech parEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
Speech parEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
Speech parEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
Speech parEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
Speech parEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
NEC Corporation
SYSTEM AJP (JAPAN)
NEC Corporation
VOICE ENCJP (JAPAN)
NEC Corporation
VOICE ENCJP (JAPAN)
SPEECH CUS (UNITED STATNEC Corporation
Speech parUS (UNITED STATNEC Corporation
Speech parUS (UNITED STATNEC Corporation
GB (UNITED KINGNEC Corporation
DE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
FR (FRANCE)NEC Corporation
GB (UNITED KINGNEC Corporation
DE (GERMANY) NEC Corporation
FR (FRANCE)NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation
VOICE ENCCA (CANADA)
NEC Corporation
VOICE COJP (JAPAN)
NEC Corporation
VOICE COJP (JAPAN)
NEC Corporation
VOICE COJP (JAPAN)
Method andUS (UNITED STATNEC Corporation
EU (EUROPEAN UNEC Corporation
METHOD FEP (EPO /EuropeaNEC Corporation
METHOD FWO (PCT /PatentNEC Corporation

IPR declaration information
Projects
Standards
Declaration references Declaration dates Essential to projects Non-essential to projects Essential to standards YES to ET Essential to standards NO Non-essential to standards
ISLD-199911-001
04/11/1999
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
ETS 300 579|TS 05.10 (v4.9.0)
ISLD-199911-001
04/11/1999
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
ETS 300 938|TS 04.06 (v5.2.1)
ISLD-199911-001
04/11/1999
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
ETS 300 579|TS 05.10 (v4.9.0)
ISLD-199911-001
04/11/1999
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
ETS 300 579|TS 05.10 (v4.9.0)
ISLD-199911-001
04/11/1999
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
ETS 300 579|TS 05.10 (v4.9.0)
ISLD-199911-001
04/11/1999
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
ETS 300 938|TS 04.06 (v5.2.1)
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044
14/01/1997
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications)
TS 06.20
ISLD-190001-044|ISLD-19014/01/1997|28/05/193GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project)|GSM (GlobalTS 126 090|TS 126 190|TS 06.60|TS 26.090|TS 26.190
ISLD-190001-044|ISLD-19014/01/1997|28/05/193GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project)|GSM (GlobalTS 126 090|TS 126 190|TS 06.60|TS 26.090|TS 26.190
ISLD-190001-044|ISLD-19014/01/1997|28/05/193GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project)|GSM (GlobalTS 126 090|TS 126 190|TS 06.60|TS 26.090|TS 26.190
ISLD-190001-044|ISLD-19014/01/1997|28/05/193GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project)|GSM (GlobalTS 126 090|TS 126 190|TS 06.60|TS 26.090|TS 26.190
ISLD-190001-044|ISLD-19014/01/1997|28/05/193GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project)|GSM (GlobalTS 126 090|TS 126 190|TS 06.60|TS 26.090|TS 26.190
ISLD-201007-008
25/06/2010
e-transport (Intelligent transport systems)
TS 102 636-6-1 (v0.0.7)
ISLD-201007-008
25/06/2010
e-transport (Intelligent transport systems)
TS 102 636-6-1 (v0.0.7)
ISLD-201007-008
25/06/2010
e-transport (Intelligent transport systems)
TS 102 636-6-1 (v0.0.7)

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2011 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

28