Samsung has designed their own chipsets (Exynos series), but Qualcomm will only grant a patent license for them to use their chipsets as part of their own phones. They won't allow Samsung to sell Exynos chips to be used by other companies.
Apparently the r&d costs in this space are higher then lawyer fees. Otherwise why wouldn't they dump some money into r&d and get some patents of their own to cross license with Qualcomm.
Samsung, Intel and Apple have enough cash and tech clout to crush Qualcomm into dust if they really wanted to compete on r&d.
Throwing a few million at a lawsuit is just a negotiation tactic.
Qualcomm would still be likely to participate in any future standard and would likely still have contributing patents. If they aren't going to license it now under FRAND then why would they do so in the future ? Whether Intel, Samsung, Apple et al contribute more to the standard is irrelevant.
Also Mediatek and Qualcomm have their own patent sharing agreement:
https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/press-releases/joint-pub...
My opinion is that since apple is making 40b a year on iPhone sales, 50% of Qualcomms market cap a year, then Qualcomm is charging Apple a fair and reasonable price. If qualcomm chose not to be part of the LTE standard, those patents would still be enforceable, and they could charge whatever they want, like they did with wcdma.
I think legally FRAND is defined ambiguous enough that many kinds of pricing schemes are acceptable, so there is nothing illegal with qualcomm charging a percentage of device cost.
My point on bringing up MediaTek was that if Apple wants a discount, they can cross license with Qualcomm, like other companies have. Intel can offer Qualcomm it's fabs, or x86, or server patents. Qualcomms pricing has not been so unfair or prohibitive as to prevent small or large players from making a mountain of profits from the cellular device market.
I own stock in both Qualcomm and Apple, so I feel like they are both wasting money on lawyers instaead of engineers :).
I'm sure there's plenty of cross-licensing already, but Qualcomm gets close to 80% of its pre-tax profits from patent licensing, so they have asymmetric incentives and are in very different bargaining positions. (Source: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21715705-its-biggest-...)
I'm highly skeptical of patents as a whole, so I do find it hard to cry tears of sympathy for patent warmongers like Intel, Samsung and Apple, even if Qualcomm is a particularly bad actor.