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Ericsson Enters France Telecom's Turbo Codes Licensing Program for 3G

Posted on: Thursday, 22 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

France Telecom (NYSE:FTE), a world leading communications carrier and innovator through its research and development group, and Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERICY), an industry leading vendor, enabling mass market adoption of 3G solutions worldwide, have entered into a patent license agreement under France Telecom's Turbo Codes Licensing Program. Under terms of the agreement France Telecom has granted Ericsson a worldwide license to France Telecom's seminal Turbo Codes patents for use in Ericsson's third generation (3G) mobile communications products encompassing WCDMA to HSDPA.

Invented by Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux of Ecole Nationale Surperieure des Telecommunications (ENST) in Brittany, France, Turbo Codes have been adopted by the leading third generation (3G) cellular standards, 3GPP (UMTS/W-CDMA) and 3GPP2 (CDMA2000), in order to provide previously unavailable error correction performance at commercially viable costs. According to industry analyst estimates 3G standards are expected to represent at least a third of all cellular users by 2009.

Turbo Codes are an innovative form of forward error correction (FEC), one of the fundamental building blocks of any type of digital communications with increases in network data capacity and power efficiencies close to the theoretical "Shannon limit." These advantages combined with increasing bandwidth demands and the maturity of Turbo Codes technology have led to their adoption in a wide array of commercially available and successful communications standards including: cellular (UMTS, CDMA2000), satellite (DVB-RCS, CCSD), broadband wireless, and home powerline networking (HomePlugAV). The invention and inventors of Turbo Code have been widely recognized for this achievement with nominations and awards ranging from nominee for European Inventor of the Year 2006, to the award of the 2005 Marconi Prize, and recipients of the 1998 IEEE (Information Theory) Golden Jubilee Award.

"This agreement signifies our continuing progress with the Turbo Code Licensing Program and our efforts to provide this commercially successful and cost effective technology to 3G market leaders," said Mustapha Tagredj, Patent Licensing Director for France Telecom. "As such, we are pleased to welcome Ericsson, a company shaping the future of mobile and broadband communications as the latest entrant to our Turbo Codes Licensing Program."

France Telecom is committed to making the benefits of Turbo Codes available to customers implementing a variety of digital communication solutions as well as those customers implementing 3G compliant technology for which France Telecom's patents are considered essential. In order to facilitate this process France Telecom established the Turbo Codes Licensing Program (TCLP) in late 2001. Since that time over thirty (30) licensees have secured access to Turbo Codes technology under the TCLP through France Telecom working with its licensing agent, Spectra Licensing Group. The list of worldwide licensees ranges from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies which have provided over 100 million Turbo Codes enabled products, thus making Turbo Codes the most widespread iterative coding technology in the world. For more information regarding the Turbo Codes Licensing Program, please visit France Telecom R&D at www.francetelecom.com/en/group/rd/offer/brevets/programmes/ licensprog.html. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

About France Telecom

France Telecom, one of the world's leading telecommunications operators, serves more than 145 million clients on five continents (220 countries or territories) as of December 31, 2005 and had consolidated sales of 49 billion Euros by IFRS standards in 2005. For the 1st quarter 2006, consolidated sales were 12.81 billion Euros by IFRS standards. Introduced in June 2005, the transformative NExT program (New Experience in Telecommunications) will permit the Group to pursue its transformation as an integrated operator and to establish it as the operator of reference for new telecommunications services in Europe. By 2008, its customers will have access to a universe of enhanced and simplified communications services notably through the Orange brand.

Number two mobile operator and provider of internet services in Europe and amongst the world leaders in providing telecommunication services to multi-national companies, France Telecom (NYSE:FTE) is listed on the Paris and New York stock exchanges.

http://www.francetelecom.com/en/groupe/rd

Source: Business Wire

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