What I don't understand is how companies can hold patents on something that is so clearly a standard that is required to be used by anyone that wants to connect to an LTE based network. If anything these patents should be licensed under FRAND, and should be licensed by the manufacturer of the modem not by every single device manufacturer that happens to include an LTE enabled modem in their device.
I don't quite understand how someone can own patents on a standard and selectively allow and disallow people from using that standard. Why hasn't this been banned? Why are there no completely open standards for communication between a wireless base-station and a wireless node?
Are there any patents on VHF/UHF communications using FM/AM modulation? Were there any patents that have expired that I am not aware of because I am fairly young compared to the technology (avid HAM radio user ... not nearly as well educated on its history)? Where these same patent battles happening when people were building radio's?
I agree it's weird that the scope of the patents aren't limited to the actual modems and that the modem manufacturers haven't handled the licensing. But, maybe things are too fragmented... the modem chipset doesn't include the antenna or the SIM card. Possibly the patents cover things that are only possible once assembled. Given different antenna designs you couldn't expect the modem manufacturer to provide a blanket license them all. If that makes any sense. Similarly a floppy disk drive manufacturer doesn't provide universal licenses for all possible software that could be stored on a floppy used in the drive.
But your point about UHF/VHF is very interesting and I'd also be interested in learning more. There were at least a few famous big battles over radio (Tesla/Marconi/Edison) and TV (Farnsworth/RCA) but these are inventor vs company (probably more entertaining than bigcorp vs bigcorp). I'm sure the transition to color TV was quite ripe for company vs company battles. There was also the big change in patent law/precident mid last century. In an entrepreneurship course taught by a patent attorney, he described it as patents suddenly having big value while having been nearly worthless previously.
I don't quite understand how someone can own patents on a standard and selectively allow and disallow people from using that standard. Why hasn't this been banned? Why are there no completely open standards for communication between a wireless base-station and a wireless node?
Are there any patents on VHF/UHF communications using FM/AM modulation? Were there any patents that have expired that I am not aware of because I am fairly young compared to the technology (avid HAM radio user ... not nearly as well educated on its history)? Where these same patent battles happening when people were building radio's?