Verizon Makes An End Run Around 3G Chip Ban

Ah, Lawyers. At once both the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems (or maybe that was beer). Verizon apparently got fed up waiting for the President of the United States to help them and decided to help themselves. The problem was that Qualcomm 3G chips infringed on a Broadcom patent, so the International Trade Commission put the kybosh on any imports of new devices with the chips. Not good.

Instead, Verizon is just going to give Broadcom their blood money license fee - to the tune of 6 bucks for every handset, with some caps. Qualcomm is probably crying on the lawyers and in their beer, because it means that in order for any carrier to buy their chips, one of two things needs to happen now:

• They need to pursue the lawsuit against Broadcom's patent on their own and win
• Any carrier that wants to use their chips has to pay an extra fee to Broadcom.

Or, of course, those carriers could just go to some other chipmaker. Gee, what other chipmaker besides Qualcomm have I mentioned in this story?

Under a licensing agreement, Verizon will pay Broadcom $6 for every handset, PDA, or data card that uses EvDO (Evolution-Data Optimized) mobile broadband technology. The carrier will make the payments up to a ceiling of $40 million per calendar quarter and a lifetime maximum of $200 million. As part of the deal, Verizon also will drop an effort to overturn the ruling. Other terms are confidential, according to a statement released by the two companies.

Read: Verizon-Broadcom deal via jkOnTheRun