tly creates such dependency risks, and all stakeholders need to work closely to be able to minimize big changes in plans as much as possible and keep surprises to a minimum. Of course, safe project planning in terms of planning additional time as a buffer could help mitigate the issues to a certain extent. Standardization Delays Much of LTE development has been rigorously driven by extremely dedicated people working as part of the standardization committees under the aegis of the 3GPP. It must be remembered though that standardization efforts are driven by people who work mostly for different participant companies that are trying to promote the agenda of their employer along with developing the standard. Hence, in spite of the best interests of the people involved, there may be issues with specifications for some standards and delays may be inevitable. It may also be that only when some standards are defined that further issues come up, which necessitates further specification efforts to be resolved. This is especially true for LTE where the standards are being developed for some problems that have not been solved at all until now, like SON, for example. Hence, SON will continue to be refined and be deployable only with LTE-Advanced, and such delays cannot be avoided. Operators must therefore be prudent and keep a wary eye on the standardization progress of important features in order to know well in advance if delays are imminent so that they can pursue alternate solutions wherever possible. Patent Costs If there is one moral that has been reemphasized through all the patent battles in recent times, it is that patents cost money and are really valuable. It is worth noting that companies pursue patents for many reasons. First, patents grant a company an advantage for an innovation that they have implemented and hence should provide avenues to monetize the same through licensing costs. Second, patents are useful to negotiate with a competitor who has a complementary set of patents to be able to cross-license the p