The Nortel patents sold this week for $4.5 billion to , while previous deals for Nortel’s four key product groups – Enterprise, Carrier VoIP, Wireless and Metro Ethernet – netted just about $4 billion.

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Ericsson paid just under $2 billion for the company's and divisions, while Avaya paid just under $1 billion for its . Ciena paid $770 million for Nortel’s , while Genband coughed up just under $300 million for .

The economies of scale tipped the scale. Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony all have skin in the $4.5 billion pot, which they covet for its 6,000 patents spanning wireless, wireless 4G, data networking, optical, voice, Internet, service provider and semiconductors.

The consortium beat out Google, which made an initial offer of $900 million.