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.
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.
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.
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.
They used to be able to make 5G phones until USA said they can't anymore. Maybe they still sell some in Russia or India? I'm sure there are some other markets.
Big companies were sometimes getting sanction waivers. In energy, Exxon for example has been getting waivers to keep investing in Russian oil and gas since 2014. They got out in 2022 though, and the waivers stopped (I've no idea which ended first, the waivers or Exxon's interest in those projects).
Here in Europe, the Unified Patent Court just rubberstamped software patents with a smartwatch decision, saying adding a button makes the whole thing patentable, even though it's only software.
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central Unitary patent court (UPC), which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators."
Not to mention the judges in that court are part time working for Nokia or Airbus.
And now they are just giving it away ?
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.
Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.
Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though.
No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years.
Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth.
Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.
I'm not talking about the company which makes "Nokia Phones". I'm talking about Nokia the infrastructure company.
They've been making their own 5g phones since 2023 (mate 60)
Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.
Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.
Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side.
Like FFII.org predicted in 2006:
https://ffii.org/
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central Unitary patent court (UPC), which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators."
Not to mention the judges in that court are part time working for Nokia or Airbus.
Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85n2vyleo)
You can ask AI to summarise the list of when for example apple ignored patents. I get 16 cases.