Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson has signed its first license agreements for LTE technology patents, allowing other companies to use the technology, an Ericsson official said on Monday.

Gustav Brismark, vice president of patent strategies at Ericsson, told Reuters the firm already had more than 80 similar patent agreements in place for earlier mobile network technologies, such as GSM and WCDMA.

The first agreements including LTE have been signed, and over time more or less all these agreements will be renegotiated to include LTE, but that will not be done in a day, he said.

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is a new high-speed mobile network technology, intended to boost capacity in wireless networks to cope with increasing data traffic.

Ericsson invests heavily in research and development. Licensing agreements for patents is one way of capitalizing on these investments.

We see that we are keeping our leading position as we go from GSM to WCDMA to LTE. That is important to be able to continue the strategy of having license revenues as one part of what Ericsson makes money from, Brismark said.

(Reporting by Sven Nordenstam; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)

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