Sprint, Samsung Electronics, Intel Corporation, Clearwire, Cisco, and Alcatel-Lucent have joined to form and announce the Open Patent Alliance or OPA. The forming of the OPA is to accelerate the widespread adoption and deployment of WiMAX products and technology, and supports innovation via broader choice with lower service and equipment costs for WiMAX tech, apps, and devices worldwide.

No doubt on your travels on the net waves you have now and again come across WiMAX being mentioned, so just what is WiMAX? Well, it is a 4G IP based broadband wireless tech which brings greater throughput for the mobile internet video-rich content along with bandwidth intensive apps at low cost, and is based on the IEEE 802.16e standard. It is OPA’s goal to form a WiMAX pool, which will hopefully help those companies who participate to obtain access to patent licenses from patent owners.

The OPA’s patent pool will aggregate patent rights needed to execute the WiMAX standard which will be defined by the WiMAX Forum along with IEEE802.16e standard. Apparently this approach will provide a more competitive royalty structure by simply changing only the features required to develop WiMAX products.

As well as forming the WiMAX patent pool, OPA is to educate the WiMAX ecosystem and serve as a central source for WiMAX property rights topics, and will issue a call for WiMAX essential patents for entering in its patent pool, and said patent pool will be overseen by an independent third party reviewer who will act as the “Patent referee.”

Source — slashphone