Unified Patents is happy to announce a new zone to deter patent abuse in the Standard Essential Patent (SEP) space through its newly launched Wi-Fi 6 Zone. This new Zone brings together a fast-growing network of members to address asymmetries in licensing Wi-Fi 6 standard essential patents and creates a fair and transparent patent licensing process around core patents supporting the next wave of consumer technology growth.

The current Wi-Fi patent landscape is complicated, to say the least. Sisvel’s launched Wi-Fi 6 pool, composed mostly of Huawei patents, constitutes less than 14% of the SEPs needed based on our OPAL Landscape tool at the time of posting.  Also, implementing Wi-Fi 6 requires licenses to Wi-Fi 1-5. However, only one common licensor exists between Sisvel’s Wi-Fi 1-5 and Wi-Fi 6 pools - Philips.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi 6 will represent almost $265B, or nearly one-third, of Wi-Fi-Enabled GDP by 2025. Given these economic implications and the ubiquitous nature of Wi-Fi in our everyday lives, members need the tools and data necessary to negotiate FRAND licenses in good faith.

Zone members get access to Unified’s tools – the Wi-Fi landscaping (OPAL) tool and the standard submission (OPEN) tool. Unified has also commissioned an economic report (OVAL) to determine FRAND for Wi-Fi 6, due out Q2 2023.

Unified’s OPAL tool objectively scores the statistical essentiality of patent publications to Wi-Fi 6 functionality. Experts manually evaluated over three thousand patent families to create the AI training set and scored them all for statistical essentiality. Full-text search is available via patent, application number, family ID, filing date, etc.

Unified’s OPEN tool provides an indexed and full-text searchable repository of all 122,000 IEEE Wi-Fi submissions, including the 7000+ technical submissions to the Wi-Fi 6 working group.

Finally, Unified’s OVAL tool is a commissioned economic report to determine a Wi-Fi 6 FRAND. Using Innovatio, similar cases, and the likely changes in Wi-Fi 6 chip prices, the economic report will determine the incremental value of new Wi-Fi 6 applications and products. 

Unified Patents’ SEP Wi-Fi 6 zone provides members with the tools and data necessary for impactful FRAND negotiations and to deter invalid or unessential assertions.