How many competitive LTE chipset manufacturers exist?
I know of three LTE modem manufacturers: Qualcomm, Intel, Mediatek.
I also wish Samsung would sell its Exynos chips to other smartphone OEMs. They've hinted in the past that it's Qualcomm the one blocking them from doing that with patents. Regulators should take a closer look at that.
The problem here isn't that Samsung doesn't want to license Qualcomm's patents, but that Qualcomm DOES NOT license their patents to their baseband competitors (eg, Samsung, Mediatek, Intel); instead Qualcomm wants to collect royalties from the end-device makers (eg, HTC, Samsung Mobile).
This is precisely why anti-trust/competition regulators have been going after Qualcomm recently.
It's not like QCom are NPE trolls. They actually did all the ground work of creating CDMA as a viable technology. The patent system is there to reward them for their research efforts.
In other words, Qualcomm voluntarily declared their wireless patents to Standard Setting Orgnizations (SSO) such as ETSI, ITU, etc to become part of standards that all chipmakers must implement. Qualcomm is, under their agreement with SSO's, required to license their wireless to all willing licensees at FRAND terms. In exchange for giving up their monopoly, Qualcomm gets guaranteed income from all uses of wireless standards such as LTE in baseband chips, or mobile phones.
Qualcomm is still very much relevant in the phone industry.
I think there are plenty of radio modem makers/competitors now. It's not to say that it's easy to make your own chips, but the real problem here is that Qualcomm does not believe in licensing their wireless patents to baseband makers. Qualcomm wants to collect royalties from OEM's customers instead for greater licensing fee.
Really, I'm wondering what happens whenever 5G or whatever comes after 4G/LTE comes around. And in how long approximately that will be.
Even if some competitors will make 5G chipsets, they still will have to build in everything from good ol' GSM over EDGE over HSxPA to 4G in addition, because what use is a phone (or IoT gadget!) that only works in major urban areas where 5G deployments will happen first? All this will have to incorporate Qualcomm patents at the least, and most likely also Qualcomm chipsets.
Hell when I drive to the German country side I more often than not only have EDGE, and the situation in developing countries is even more dire.