>Intel is ready, willing, and able to compete on the merits in this market that Qualcomm has dominated for years
I would have more sympathy for Intel if they were able to compete fairly in the x86 market. I can't help but feel amused when a company that partakes in monopolistic practices in one market starts complaining about being the victim in another. However, in the case I think Intel is the lesser of two evils, but they're still bedfellows.
The difference here is that Qualcomm agreed (along with other contributors) ahead of time to license these exact patents to LTE implementors in a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory manner: that is, to charge license fees which do not exceed their value in Qualcomm's own products.
Intel never made any agreement to any consortium that they would do anything like this, they applied fairly for patents on the considerable number of geniune inventions and design decisions which go into their silicon and ISA.
Many of these patents have long expired, and even when they weren't expired, manufacturers such as IBM, AMD, Texas Instruments, Harris Semiconductor, UMC, Acer, SGS Thomson, Cyrix, Rise Technology, Transmeta, IDT, VIA, and DM&P Electronics manufactured 80386, 80486, 80586 (pentium), 80686 (pentium pro), and Core competitors.
x86 being co-monopolized by AMD and Intel is a recent phenomenon, and I think it has more to do with the fatigue of trying to compete with AMD and Intel at making chips with probably the most complicated and unscalable ISAs to implement efficiently.
So in addition to seemingly breaking the agreement they made, they are being more predatory than most prominent patent licensors who didn't need an agreement to behave more fairly than they do.
I would have more sympathy for Intel if they were able to compete fairly in the x86 market. I can't help but feel amused when a company that partakes in monopolistic practices in one market starts complaining about being the victim in another. However, in the case I think Intel is the lesser of two evils, but they're still bedfellows.