Nortel is a Canadian telecom company once a giant in its field with more than 90000 employees has now come to auction due to its bankruptcy. The company is auctioning its patents, there are more than 4000 patents coming into auction which are grouped into six categories so that many companies can buy their patents instead of a single company getting all their patents.
Apple and Google are participating in the bid. The auction also contains the 3g and 4g patents which draws these companies into the bid yet they have not disclosed their bidders. There is also an estimation that the patents are of a billion dollars worth. Since Apple is facing lots of litigations this auction might be a useful thing in this time. The 4g is a cellular wireless standard which is fully secure Internet protocol based mobile broadband for laptops, smart phones and etc, it has a downloading speed of 100 Mbps for fast mobility communication and 1Gbps for slow mobility communication, previous versions were the pre-4g mobile WiMAX and first release 3g long term evolution. Norton was also one of the first firms to have this WiMAX technology.