atents and make sure both are able to share advantages in a respectable manner. And third, patents are also used as a corporation weapon to destabilize competition by citing patent violations and ensuring that the competitor is unable to sells its product. This latter reason has been seen being actively played out in the past few years in courts all over the world between Samsung and Apple. Coming back to LTE though, it was recognized very early on that allowing such patents to be granted will make life very difficult for many companies to offer product solutions, and the innovations will not be coming forth as a few companies with specific and crucial patents will stifle innovation, increase costs of the UEs and solutions to unmanageable levels, and in the long term prevent LTE from being adopted, developed, or deployed. So, to control such intellectual property rights (IPR) costs, a few like-minded companies with key patents in LTE, namely Ericsson, NSN, Nokia, NEC, and Nextwave wireless, collectively agreed to minimum royalty payments for their shared patent use in single digits of the handset sale price and to not exceed more than $10 for LTE modems in Netbooks (seehttp://www.ericsson.com/news/1209031). It is also worthwhile to note that key players like Qualcomm are not part of this arrangement. Also, other big players in LTE like Huawei, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments are also not part of the above consortium. It is also clear that there are lots of innovation reports still being filed in all key and crucial areas of LTE, such as line interference management, SON, and handover optimizations, which implies that patent battles are far from over for LTE systems. CHAPTER 3 DEPLOYMENT CHALLENGES IN EVOLVING 4G This should be of much concern to operators as the mobile devices they are planning to roll out may become embroiled in patent wars and may get banned from being sold. Deployments could get delayed, UEs could end up costing more, and consumers may, in the meantime, find other offerings to be more interest