PARIS and SAN DIEGO -- France Telecom (NYSE:FTE - News), a world leading communications carrier and innovator through its research and development group, and Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERICY - News), an industry leading vendor, enabling mass market adoption of 3G solutions worldwide, have entered into a patent license agreement under France Telecom's Turbo Codes Licensing Program. Under terms of the agreement France Telecom has granted Ericsson a worldwide license to France Telecom's seminal Turbo Codes patents for use in Ericsson's third generation (3G) mobile communications products encompassing WCDMA to HSDPA.

Invented by Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux of Ecole Nationale Surperieure des Telecommunications (ENST) in Brittany, France, Turbo Codes have been adopted by the leading third generation (3G) cellular standards, 3GPP (UMTS/W-CDMA) and 3GPP2 (CDMA2000), in order to provide previously unavailable error correction performance at commercially viable costs. According to industry analyst estimates 3G standards are expected to represent at least a third of all cellular users by 2009.

Turbo Codes are an innovative form of forward error correction (FEC), one of the fundamental building blocks of any type of digital communications with increases in network data capacity and power efficiencies close to the theoretical "Shannon limit." These advantages combined with increasing bandwidth demands and the maturity of Turbo Codes technology have led to their adoption in a wide array of commercially available and successful communications standards including: cellular (UMTS, CDMA2000), satellite (DVB-RCS, CCSD), broadband wireless, and home powerline networking (HomePlugAV). The invention and inventors of Turbo Code have been widely recognized for this achievement with nominations and awards ranging from nominee for European Inventor of the Year 2006, to the award of the 2005 Marconi Prize, and recipients of the 1998 IEEE (Information Theory) Golden Jubilee Award.

"This agreement signifies our continuing progress with the Turbo Code Licensing Program and our efforts to provide this commercially successful and cost effective technology to 3G market leaders," said Mustapha Tagredj, Patent Licensing Director for France Telecom. "As such, we are pleased to welcome Ericsson, a company shaping the future of mobile and broadband communications as the latest entrant to our Turbo Codes Licensing Program."

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