The Open Patent Alliance has formally launched their WiMAX patent pool effort after a year of planning with industry heavyweights including Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion and Cisco.

The OPA issued a call for patents essential to WiMAX technology and appointed Via Licensing to administer the pool. Via Licensing is also coordinating one of three separate LTE patent pool efforts.

“4G is really going to be about mobile internet… and it takes a lot of device diversity to make the business case,” says Yung Hahn, president of the OPA. “We needed to get the ecosystems together to make 4G viable.”

Hahn says that the patent processes in separate areas of the WiMAX ecosystem are very different, making litigation over patent infringement, licensing and intellectual property rights highly likely. The key to avoiding an endless stream of legal scuffles, says Hahn, is a patent pool.

The OPA believes that a WiMAX patent pool could be an important step speeding global adoption of the technology by lowering the costs of adopting WiMAX and creating legal precedents for intellectual property rights disputes.

The OPA needs to attract a critical mass of essential WiMAX patents to its effort, which has already attracted the likes of Clearwire, Huawei, Intel, Samsung Electronics and the aforementioned Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion and Cisco.