Femtocells – The Femto Forum Needs To Avoid The Mistakes of the LTE Gang

I recently opined on the huge mistakes the LTE (long term evolution) Gang was making with establishing rules of licensing intellectual property. The LTE Gang is operating outside the guideline of the global standards community and that is a huge mistake. The global standards community has rules on how to establish standards and yet still facilitate the creation of and licensing of intellectual property by its members.

My suggestion to the Femto Forum is that a process needs to be established that does not circumvent the standards process. It does look like the Femto Forum is going to follow a sensible process. The Forum has announced that it plans to develop the nuts and bolts of the protocols and architecture and then submit the work to the wireless standards bodies governing UMTS and CDMA, the 3GPP and the 3GPP2, and eventually to the WiMAX Forum. Now that is the way to write a standard.

The process does not dictate how licensing fees are established. However, one thing is for sure, the LTE Gang’s process of licensing patents is clearly getting in the way of writing standards. My advice to the Femto Forum is it should focus on creating technical standards and keep the business of money out of the discussions.