I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.

To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.

I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.

https://insights.greyb.com/5g-patent-landscape/

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.

Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.

> And now they are just giving it away ?

That's now how standards work - to become 5g the tech needs to be implementable by everyone at a FRAND cost (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Sharing patents just means Qualcomm and Huawei won't bill each other.

Huawei is a massive R&D company - I'm sure they're contributing as much as Qualcomm

I don't understand how standards are allowed to be patent encumbered - I get it they aren't really, but more often than not (like with the Oracle vs Google Java lawsuit) there's just one possible and obvious way to implement patents thats both efficient and correct.

For example in telco, error correcting codes are often designed in a way, that there's an algorithm that can turn the logic into a netlist.

Huawei has been leading in 5G deployments until US decides him and his allies cannot be friends with Huawei.

Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.

I think this is the other way around.

The point is that this allows QC to sell chips in China without royalty.

The US will never lead 5G because many key patents there are owned by Huawei. Same for 6G. They're just now acknowledging reality.

maybe 6g is on the way and they don't care about 5g anymore.

Everyone else wrote the 5G specs but Huawei built the hardware.

Nortel 2.0.

Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.

Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.