These shared technologies expose Wi-Fi 6 to assertions from a large collection of patents that were innovated in connection with LTE and 5G well before the development of Wi-Fi 6. As of January 2023, over 66,000 patent grants have been self-declared to ETSI as being essential to the LTE or 5G radio access network (RAN) and 70% of those have been declared to the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers. About 3% of those active grants use in their claims, abstract, or title the keywords \u201cbeamform\u201d, MU-MIMO, or OFDMA but this likely only covers a portion of the LTE and 5G declared patents that may be relevant for the Wi-Fi 6 core technologies. The timeline below shows the priority dates for this innovation from a 3GPP perspective. As can be seen from the chart below, the major push for PHY and MAC innovation as measured by the priority dates of the relevant patents occurred during LTE\u2019s development and standardization years 2004 – 2009.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents OPAL<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nBF, MU-MIMO, and OFDMA also attracted a lot of attention in the technical submissions made to IEEE\u2019s 802.11 Task Groups ac and ax (TGac and TGax) and High Efficiency WLAN Study Group (HEW SG) during the development of the Wi-Fi 5 and 6 standards. The chart below shows that 41% of the technical submissions referenced these core technologies.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents OPEN<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nBF, MU-MIMO, and OFDMA were first a heavy focus in 2009 – 2011 when Wi-Fi 5 was being standardized. BF was a part of Wi-Fi 5 when wave 1 was released in 2013 and MU-MIMO for the AP downlink became part of Wi-Fi 5 with the release of wave 2 in 2016. The increase in attention to these core technologies during 2015 – 2018 coincides directly with the efforts to increase Wi-Fi 6\u2019s capacity and decrease potential signal interference amongst the exploding numbers of IoT devices forecasted.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents OPAL<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nThe charts below compare the timelines for standardization work and patenting involving each of the Wi-Fi 6 core technologies. The patents covered in these charts comprise the patents identified to be potentially relevant to BF, MU-MIMO, and OFDMA in Wi-Fi based on relevant keyword searches of patents that (i) list as an inventor a participant in Wi-Fi 6 standardization work, (ii) cite CPC code H0W4, or (iii) cite IEEE and IEEE 802 in their listed non-patent literature.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents\u2019 OPEN and OPAL<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nSource: Unified Patents\u2019 OPEN and OPAL<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nSource: Unified Patents\u2019 OPEN and OPAL<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nIn each of the core technology cases, a lag of 1-2 years and a significantly lower level of input can be observed when comparing the 3GPP technical submission timeline with the IEEE technical submission timeline. Further, the charts show that a large portion of the patents potentially relevant to Wi-Fi 6 arose from innovation during the standardization of LTE. That is not to say that patents did not arise from innovation during the standardization of Wi-Fi 5 or 6. The peak in 2015 – 2018 in innovation and in both IEEE and 3GPP technical submissions results arguably from a combination of 3GPP and IEEE standardization work.\u00a0 The graph below shows in more detail the timelines of BF referencing technical submissions by Intel and Qualcomm, both entities heavily invested in Wi-Fi 6 and 5G technologies during the period 2014 – 2019.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents OPEN for IEEE and 3GPP<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nOne could speculate that the delay in focus on beamforming between Wi-Fi 6 and 5G standardization work is due to resource prioritization. However, it should be pointed out that both Intel and Qualcomm support IEEE and 3GPP standardization work with large separate representation teams with very little overlap. There is, however, noticeable overlap between the inventors listed on the potentially relevant patents.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents OPEN<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nOf even more interest is that the beamforming references made by these two firms in their Wi-Fi 6 technical submissions increased dramatically after the first draft of the Wi-Fi 6 standard was voted on in January 2017. Since the vote on the first draft in January 2017 reached only a 58% consensus, far below the 75% required, it is possible that beamforming was one of the issues in the first draft that required more development. It was not until the vote on the 3rd Wi-Fi 6 draft in July of 2018 that a consensus of over 75% was reached and this seems to have coincided with Intel\u2019s and Qualcomm\u2019s interest in beamforming in their technical submissions.<\/p>\n
The observation that many Wi-Fi 6 core technologies result from 3GPP standardization is supported by the owners of the potentially relevant Wi-Fi 6 patents, as many of them have declared these same patents as being essential to LTE and 5G. The table below shows the percentages of potential Wi-Fi 6 relevant patents referencing the core technology keywords that have been self-declared by various industry sectors to be LTE and 5G SEPs.<\/p>\n
Source: Unified Patents OPAL for Wi-Fi 6, LTE, and 5G<\/em><\/p><\/div>\nThe charts below show the patenting focus of the top 10 patent holders for each of the Wi-Fi 6 core technologies and target wake time (TWT). The patent grant counts below result from the core technology keyword searches described earlier. Notable from the graphs below is that many of the prominent self-declared LTE and 5G SEP holders populate the top 10 lists for these core technologies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Part II, we will look at how the IEEE\u2019s recent IPR rule changes will affect the trends and technologies we\u2019ve detailed here.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wi-Fi 6 shares new technologies with LTE and 5G that are subject to heavy patenting. The firms and institutions that currently monetize their standard essential patents (SEPs) against LTE and 5G will likely be looking to increase their royalty income from Wi-Fi 6 and 6e. This could mean that the recent disputes over LTE and 5G standardization participants\u2019 fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) SEP licensing commitments will spill over into Wi-Fi. Current Wi-Fi litigation trends suggest that this is already afoot, and the recent licensor-friendly changes in the IEEE IPR rules are feared to only fuel this trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110679,"featured_media":157997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6998,3,1031,38597,37020,187],"tags":[5531,4315,38,49,8780,43086,33,107,8742,14275,6791,44513,172,74200],"yst_prominent_words":[31311],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157983"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157983"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158000,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157983\/revisions\/158000"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157983"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=157983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}