Industry committee  Mr. Lake, if I could respond to that, as part of the stalking horse process and ultimately the auction, a minimum of 2,500 jobs were committed as part of the transaction. It doesn't specify that that is the total number, but it specifies a minimum. Of those, approximately 800 jobs are located in Canada, the majority of them in the Ottawa area.

Industry committee  The patents we have taken for the CDMA business, as an example, are patents that are predominantly used by that technology and are actually being sold with that asset sale. In the case of the LTE assets, there is a non-exclusive licence around the field of use of infrastructure that is going with the transaction.

Industry committee  I'll do my best. The transaction involves the CDMA business. CDMA is a particular type of technology for cellphone usage. It's predominantly used in North America. It was actually originally developed by Qualcomm in the United States and adopted by a number of the major operators in North America—in Canada that included Bell Canada and Telus, and in the United States Verizon, Sprint, U.S.

Industry committee  It is a maturing technology. The overall market capex is declining at around 10% to 15% per year over time. I still expect that the CDMA technology will exist in the world as a dominant voice technology out through the middle of 2015 to 2020. So it's not going to go away any time soon, but most of the work that's going on now is really enhancement to the existing technology as opposed to fundamental development.

Industry committee  The development of LTE technology began in around 2006 and 2007. Some of the underlying patents supporting the technology dated back probably to 1998 and 1999, but the development work by and large has occurred in the last two to three years. We're spending about $140 million this year on that technology.

Industry committee  As Mr. Riedel said, the question was not around the capability of our technology; it was the sustainability of our entity that was brought into question by our customers. You can have the greatest technology in the world, but if your customer is unwilling to purchase the technology as a commercial product from you, then you're left with an investment without any return.

Industry committee  That's correct.

Industry committee  If I could answer that, Mr. Braid, I don't want to call it a business, because again, there are no commercial contracts associated with LTE. But in regard to the assets that are being transferred, it is the majority of the research and development individuals associated with the LTE development in North America.

Industry committee  The patents that are licensed allow the buying party to utilize the software development and the algorithms that exist within the development regime, but the patents themselves can be subsequently sold.

Industry committee  Sure. The LTE technology that is being developed worldwide is an open protocol, an international standard. It's being developed by the third-generation partnership project called 3GPP. There are at least seven companies developing this technology to an open standard. That's the first thing I'd like to say.

Industry committee  There is encryption technology that's actually part of the standard, so public safety is an application that could be developed. Much as with CDMA, there are public safety applications, as with other types of air-interface technologies.

Industry committee  On LTE specifically? The majority of the development dollars, as I said before, were spent in 2008-09. We've spent maybe an additional $50 million between 1998 and 2006, and then we've spent about $300 million since then on the technology.

Industry committee  I guess I would put it this way. As with any technology, there is an ebb and flow of investment. Most of our investment between 1996 and 2006 in fact was with the CDMA technology. As that technology matures and is replaced by the next generation, the investment in CDMA goes down and the investment in LTE goes up.

Industry committee  Again, as I said earlier, it's one thing to invest in technology and be granted or accorded kudos by the community for your technology. It's another thing to commercialize the technology. In order to do that, you need people willing to buy the technology. It became pretty apparent to us over the last 12 months that while our major customer operators really appreciated our technology and what we had done, given our situation as Nortel, they were not prepared to purchase this technology from us.

Industry committee  Again, to come back to George Riedel's points, the market value is based on certain intangibles, which is how Ericsson would likely view it. You would have to speak with them directly, but likely they would view the evolution of their customers in the network and how they would utilize this current technology, CDMA, and the future technology to grow their business because of the scale they have, the international stature they have, and the strong balance sheet they have.