It’s not about a percentage-based vs. unit-based licensing system as such. (They’re really all unit-based systems at heart, since AFAIK there’s always a cap on the unit price. The numbers I’ve heard for that are around $500, so it should not be the case that going from a 64GB to 128GB iPhone X has any effect on the license costs).
If you go by the published price lists, the numbers seem pretty sensible. Qualcomm asks for 3.25%, Nokia and Ericsson for 1.5%. Those numbers aren’t too out of line with their prospective patent portfolios. But somehow when it comes to actual revenue, Qualcomm it’s not a 2x difference but a 5-10x one.
That’s because it’s not the case that somebody asking for X% in FRAND fees is actually going to get anywhere near that. E.g. Motorola was asking for 2.25% license fees in the suit against Microsoft. This was with like a dozen LTE patents out of a thousand essential ones. Unsurprisingly that percentage didn’t hold up in court, and they got 1/100th of what they asked for.
The public FRAND terms are clearly just fiction used as a part of the negotiation. The real prices are much lower. Except for Qualcomm. That’s what I mean by leverage: somehow they manage to negotiate a far better deal than any of their equally savvy competitors with just as large patent portfolios.
Most likely they’re using access to their LTE baseband as a bludgeon.
Yeah, there’s 20 companies all trying very hard to get their own IP into the standard. And they’re all very good at it, so there’s a practical limit to how big a slice of the pie any one company can get.