A 4G/LTE patent portfolio, which includes patents having priority filing dates all the way back to April 2001, is currently for sale through ICAP Patent Brokerage. This news is of particular interest because it is not every day that you see standard essential patents hit the market, and in this case the patents cover a variety of carrier grade wireless technologies that are widely used within the industry.

The patent portfolio belongs to Raze Technologies, a research and development company founded in late 1999 with the purpose of developing a last mile access system that would allow service providers to offer both broadband data and high-quality, fully featured voice services to residential and small business customers. In August 2002, Raze suspended its development operations and focused its remaining resources on the prosecution of its patent portfolio. Over time, as most if not all of the other innovative start-ups in the space have gone the way of the dinosaur, Raze has managed to accumulate a foundationally important patent portfolio relating to standard-related innovations surrounding mobile network infrastructure technologies that relate to 4G/LTE, which is the next generation wireless standard.

This 4G/LTE patent portfolio includes 18 issued U.S. patents and another 4 pending U.S. patent applications. Broadly speaking, these patents are applicable to several technology areas with the next generation wireless and wireline technologies, particularly wide-area networks, narrow-area networks and cellular traffic to network offloading. The patents have no encumbrances, have never been licensed and have all been commonly owned by Raze Technologies since the development of the underlying innovations.

The patent assets owned by Raze can be broken down into several different categories:

1. Air interface encompassing the physical RF interface, access mechanism, routing within the network. (U.S. Patents 6,804,527, 6,859,655, 6,891,810 and 7,173,916)
2. Supporting quality of service (QoS) and prioritization of traffic including critical voice calls (such as 911 service) and service level commitments. (U.S. Patents 7,031,738, 7,035,241, 7,274,946 and RE42242)
3. Additional system capabilities to extend rage, improve coverage, and increase capacity, which cover beam forming, mobile hotspots and tethering. (U.S. Patents 6,947,477, 7,075,967, 7,230,931 and 7,346,347)
4. System design including edge routing and a grooming aggregation point that was used to effectively work with the Internet connection but also to filter and terminate a number of extraneous broadcast data packets that can and would be terminated ahead of the wireless network, which is now included in all 4G base station systems. (U.S. Patent No. 6,564,051)
5. Hardware configuration and design, innovations that were designed to protect the hot swap and redundancy capability built into the system. (U.S. Patents 6,925,516, 7,002,929, 7,065,098, 7,069,047 and 7,099,383)

Of course, whenever any high-tech patent or portfolio comes up for sale, any prudent due diligence would consider whether the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Alice v. CLS Bank would mean that the claims obtained are likely invalid and, therefore, the patent not attractive for purchase. If you look at the patents listed above and review the claims, you will find that these assets overwhelmingly cover hardware, which should make them largely immune from challenge under Alice. There are several patents with method and systems claims, but the bulk of the claims relate to various defined apparatuses, such as a time division duplex (TDD) frame transmission synchronization apparatus (for example, see the ‘929 patent), or an apparatus for interconnecting a plurality of communications mediums (for example, see the ‘051 patent), or an apparatus for facilitating radio communication with a mobile state (for example, see the ‘347 patent) or a profile-creating apparatus (for example see the ‘477 patent).

Furthermore, the specific language of the claims are written to be limited to a particular implementation. For example, in the ‘655 patent, claim 1 starts: “For use in a wireless access network, a TDD FDD system comprising…” In another example, in the ‘967 patent, claim 1 starts: “For use in a base station (BS) of a fixed wireless network capable of communicating with a plurality of subscriber transceivers via time division duplex (TDD) channels, a BS transceiver comprising…”

Given the fact that the vast majority of the claims in this portfolio are directed to devices, which are a category of invention specifically mentioned in 35 U.S.C. 101, and further given the specific context limitations, there seems little risk that these claims would be found to be patent ineligible even under the most expansive reading of Alice.

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