Six high-profile companies are teaming up to jointly license patents that cover WiMAX in an effort to prevent costly royalty rates that might deter adoption of the technology, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Vendors Cisco, Intel, Samsung and Alcatel-Lucent, and service providers Clearwire and Sprint Nextel, plan today to announce the creation of the organisation – the Open Patent Alliance – the newspaper reports. The Alliance will reportedly gather rights to WiMAX-related patents and license them to makers of computers, networking devices and other products.

The move follows a similar agreement in April by backers of the rival next-generation mobile technology, Long Term Evolution (LTE). As part of the agreement, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson agreed to keep royalty levels for what are deemed the “essential” LTE patents used in compatible handsets below 10 percent of the sale price, while the maximum royalty payment in LTE-enabled notebooks is capped at under US$10. Qualcomm and Motorola have not yet joined either the WiMAX or LTE patent pools.