Evaluation of LTE essential patents
declared to ETSI- Summary Version 3.0

1 Objectives of the survey
Mobile communication service is migrating from the third generation (3G) to LTE (LongTerm Evolution) rapidly. In Japan, NTT DOCOMO launched the first LTE service in Japan,
in December 2010, under the name of Xi (pronounced “Crossy”). The number of Xi
subscribers exceeded 12 million as of April 2013.
In contrast, the number of subscribers of FOMA, a 3G service, declined below 60 million
and decreasing. It shows that the migration to LTE is in progress.
In April 2012, ITU-R (Radio communication Sector of International Telecommunication
Union) recommended two technologies as standards for the fourth generation mobilecommunication (IMT-Advanced), i.e., LTE-Advanced and WiMAX2. Of the two technologies,
LTE-Advanced allows for the use of telecommunications services of high-speed, largecapacity, while maintaining compatibility with the current LTE, and is expected to be usedwidely in the future. NTT DOCOMO plans to start its commercial service in 2015 in Japan.
Standard specifications for LTE-Advanced and LTE have been being carried out in theThird Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which is an international standards
development project organized by the standards developing organizations in variouscountries. Keeping pace with the standardization activities, a number of patents have been
filed by companies involved in the standardization. For a patented technology to be adopted
in standards, its holder has to declare to the organizations, in relevant countries, its
willingness to make its licenses available to all third parties under fair, reasonable andnon-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
This paper evaluates the number of patents that are essential to LTE and LTE-Advanced
standards based on the patents declared to ETSI.
Although ETSI is a European standards developing organization, not only European
companies but many non-European ones have declared their patents as essential to LTE.
This is because Europe has long been a large telecom market and has fostered many
prominent companies. As such, the number of patents declared to ETSI, by participatingcompanies, should be an important indicator of the company’s “IPR power.”ETSI discloses the list of patents that have been declared, by member companies, asessential to LTE standards. To evaluate true “IPR power”, however, simply counting thenumber of declared patents, as listed in the ETSI list, is not a good measure, due to thefollowing two reasons.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

11. Objectives of the survey-Duplication of the same invention
ETSI list contains multiple patents that share a common priority, such as provisional
applications in the U.S., divisional applications, or applications to other countries. Withdivisional applications, those, which have different scopes, may well be counted
separately. But, in most cases, it is more appropriate to count them as a single patentfamily.

-Difference in company’s criteria for declaration
According to ETSI policy, companies can declare essential patents at their discretion.
ETSI does not confirm or deny whether the declared patents are really essential or not.
As a result, the definition of relevance to the standard varies, resulting in considerable
differences in the number of the declared patents.

In order to cope with these difficulties, this survey, first, sorts out the ETSI list, bygrouping the patents on a patent family basis, to derive the effective set of declared patents
to be used for evaluation. It, then, evaluates the resulting set based on common criteria todetermine the number of truly essential patents.
This survey is done based on the patents contained in the latest ETSI declaration list
and is an update to our previous report.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

22. Survey Results

2 Survey results
The main results of this survey are as follows:i)

The original list of patents declared to ETSI was obtained from the ETSI website. Bysorting them based on patent families, a total of 5,919 patents have been identified
as the subjects for this study. This is the effective number of declared patents. The
number of companies that have made declarations is 49.

ii)

The number of declared patens for each company are as follows:
Qualcomm has the largest number of declared patents (655, 11.1%) and is followed bySamsung (652, 11.0％ ), Huawei (603, 10.2%), Nokia (505, 8.5%), InterDigital (418,7.1％ ), Ericsson (399, 6.7%), ZTE (368, 6.2％ ), and LG(317, 5.4%). Declarations are
not limited to major companies, but are evenly distributed among many companies.
The nationalities of the companies are also evenly distributed among USA, Europeand Asia.

iii)

Many of the declared patents have been filed after 2005, when LTE standardization
work began. In particular, the applications filed between 2006 and 2010 are dominant,and the declarations of the applications filed between 1999 and 2004 are alsosignificant. Some companies have made declarations for the patents filed in 2011.
(especially Huawei and InterDigital)iv)

Three types of companies have been identified, namely, a) those who have declaredpatents filed during a long period of time from the early days (around 1990) to now,b) those who have declared patents filed mainly after 2005 (the year when LTE
standardization began), and c) those who have declared patents filed earlier years,
but not after 2005.

v)

The countries, where the applications have been filed with, have been surveyed.
Qualcomm, Nokia, InterDigital, Ericsson, and Motorola have been filing theirapplications with various countries in the world. Japanese and Korean companies
have also been filing their applications evenly among BRICs and other countries.

vi)

Sample patents have been extracted from the list for evaluation. Average essentiality
ratios are identified to be 56.0% for declaration-based evaluation and 51.5% forregistration-based evaluation. With regard to registration-based essentiality
evaluation, LG, NTT DOCOMO, TI, and InnovativeSonic shows high essentiality
ratios while possessing a large number of registered patents.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

3

2. Survey Resultsvii)

Legal statuses of evaluated patents in respective application countries have beenstudied. The results show that Siemens, Sony, IPR Licensing, and General Dynamics
show the highest registration ratio of 100%, and Apple and Nortel also show highratios of over 95%. In contrast, CATT and ZTE show low ratios of around 10% and15%, respectively, reflecting the fact that patent examinations have not progressed
well.

viii)

The gross numbers of essential patents have been estimated by multiplying thederived essentiality ratios by the entire number of declared patents. Qualcomm isestimated to have the largest number of essential patents (318), followed by Huawei(273), ZTE (253), Nokia (245), LG (237), Samsung (233), NTT DOCOMO (211),
InterDigital (206), Ericsson (177), CATT (141), and Motorola (111).
PantechHTC
24 (0.8%) 22 (0.7%)

Siemens
19 (0.6%)RIM
16 (0.5%)

NortelIntel
9 (0.3%) 8 (0.3%)
Sony8 (0.3%)

Alcatel‐Lucent
24 (0.8%)
Apple25
InnovativeSonic (0.8%)

TI
90 (3.0%)

Marvell
6 (0.2%)
IPR Licensing
5 (0.2%)35, (1.2%) ETRI
35 (1.2%)
Panasonic
53 (1.7%)
Nokia Siemens
63 (2.1%)
NEC64 (2.1%)
Sharp
86 (2.8%)

GeneralDynamics
8 (0.3%)

Qualcomm
318 (10.5%)
Huawei273 (9.0%)
Motorola
111 (3.7%)
CATT
141 (4.7%)
Ericsson177 (5.8%)
InterDigital
206 (6.8%)

ZTE
253 (8.3%)
Nokia Corp
245 (8.1%)

Samsung
233 (7.7%) LG
237 (7.8%)
NTT DOCOMO
211 (7.0%)

Figure – Estimated number of essential patents

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSICopyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

4