Another ISG Wi-Fi 6 patent challenged

On October 1, 2025, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 11,641,670, owned and asserted by the International Semiconductor Group, an NPE. The '670 patent is directed to access points (APs) that are configured to use information that associates MAC addresses for terminals with association identifiers (AIDs) that are locally allocated to the terminals by the AP. The goal of this is to create a smaller list of AID-assigned terminals that is faster to search, and which allows the AP to respond quicker to the associated terminals. The '670 patent is one of over 20 patents divested from Toshiba in April this year and belongs to one of the largest families in that transfer. The '670 patent is challenged as part of Unified’s SEP Wi-Fi zone.

View ITC litigations by ISG. Unified is represented by Stephen Cortiaus and Payam Rashidi at Slater Matsil, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Vinu Raj, in this proceeding.

Another Wilus Wi-Fi patent challenged

On September 23, 2025, Unified filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 10,305,638, owned and asserted by Wilus Institute of Standards & Technology, Inc., an entity of Good Day to Invent, Inc. The claims of the '638 patent are directed to access points configured to transmit a trigger frame with a particular structure to one or more stations to coordinate a multi-user uplink transmission from the station(s). The '638 patent has been asserted by Wilus against Askey, and it is related to patents that have been asserted against Samsung and HP Inc.

View district court litigations by Wilus. Unified is represented by Alexander Stein at Morgan Lewis, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Michelle Aspen, in this proceeding.

International Semiconductor Group Wi-Fi 6 patent challenged

On September 19, 2025, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 12,137,063, owned and asserted by the International Semiconductor Group, an NPE. The '063 patent is directed to coordinating transmissions for adjacent access points (APs) that have overlapping coverage areas. The '063 patent is one of over 20 patents divested from Toshiba in April this year and belongs to one of the largest families in that transfer. The '063 patent is also related to an application currently pending before the Office.

View ITC litigations by ISG. Unified is represented by Stephen Cortiaus at Slater Matsil, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Vinu Raj, in this proceeding.

Two Wilus Wi-Fi patents challenged

On August 29, 2025, Unified filed two ex parte reexamination proceedings against U.S. Patent 10,820,233 and U.S. Patent 10,931,396, owned and asserted by Wilus Institute of Standards & Technology, Inc., an entity of Good Day to Invent, Inc.

The '233 patent is generally directed to wireless terminals that receive an A-MPDU (aggregated MAC protocol data unit) that includes a MSDU (MAC service data unit) or A-MSDU (aggregated MSDU) from multiple users and transmits back a block ACK (block acknowledgement) to at least some of those users, where the block ACK has a particular format dictated by the numerous elements of the claims. It has been asserted against Askey Computer Corporation and its routers, which are Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) enabled devices.

The '396 patent is generally directed wireless terminals that receive an A-MPDU (aggregated MAC protocol data unit) with a particular delimiter field that directs the device on the specific format of the response frame to transmit back. Like the '233, the '396 patent has been asserted against Askey and its routers, which are Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) enabled devices. The '396 patent is also related to U.S. Patent 11,664,926, which has been asserted against Samsung, HP Inc., and Askey.

View district court litigations by Wilus. Unified is represented by Michael Jones and Jake Rosvold of Rothwell Figg, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Michelle Aspen, in this proceeding.

World’s 1st Wi-Fi Economic Report finds RAND royalty rate to be between $0.04 and $0.69

Unified Patents and The Brattle Group, a renowned group of economists and damages experts, announced its economic report on the reasonable and non-discriminatory (“RAND”) licensing value of patents essential to the Wi-Fi standard (“Standard Essential Patents” or “SEPs”). The full report is available exclusively to members of Unified Patents’ Wi-Fi Zone, which includes access to Unified’s ML-based objective patent landscaping analytics (“OPAL”) and indexed IEEE standardization technical submissions repository (“OPEN”).

Brattle calculated the range of reasonable and non-discriminatory (“RAND”) royalty rates for the universe of SEPs essential to implement the full capabilities of Wi-Fi, including up to Wi-Fi 6/6E, to be between $0.04 and $0.69. For the first time an economist calculated rates based on device capability requirements using downlink speed, latency, and a new power-saving capability implemented in Wi-Fi 6 called target wake time (“TWT”). Brattle concluded that Wi-Fi devices that utilize lesser capabilities should pay lower royalties, if any, because almost all SEPs necessary for those have expired.

Brattle calculated royalty rates on Wi-Fi using two independent observations. First, using court-established global RAND rates for Wi-Fi 4 (such as the 2013 Innovatio case) as a benchmark, taking into account incremental technological improvements in Wi-Fi 6/6E, declining production costs, current and evolving use case demands, and balanced bargaining theory, they concluded rates should be steadily declining. Second, a negotiated Wi-Fi 6/6E license between a licensor and a major hardware manufacturer. Both methods accounted for objective patent quality using court accepted measures such as adjusted patent forward citations. Unified’s OPAL analytics, which includes the world’s largest training set of manually evaluated Wi-Fi patents, was used to identify the individual SEPs in the landscape. In addition, Brattle calculated the stand-alone value of TWT.

For its report, Brattle interviewed industry participants and did independent research. It found Wi-Fi 4’s capabilities are sufficient for data-intensive use cases like video, gaming, and most virtual reality (“VR”). Brattle noted producer prices and consumer prices have been flat or falling for over a decade while computing and communications performance has improved by a factor of over 50 times.

The report is designed to be used for a top-down analysis of Wi-Fi RAND rates. Together with Unified’s OPAL analytics, the report can be used to calculate the RAND rate of any patent portfolio for Wi-Fi devices based on their capability requirements as well as for individual Wi-Fi capabilities. The report and OPAL provide Wi-Fi implementers a better understanding of the value of an asserted portfolio and enables them to make RAND counter offers in good faith. OPAL also enables the identification of individual patents in an asserted portfolio and provides a suite of quality metrics such as ML-based semantic similarity scoring and geographic and reputational value, forward citation, claim breadth, and statistical validity indexes.

The full report is available exclusively through Unified Patents. In addition to economic reports, Unified provides Objective Patent Landscapes (OPAL) for many standards, including Wi-Fi 6, with the world’s largest human evaluated training set, 3GPP LTE and 5G, HEVC, AVC, and others. Unified’s standard submission database, OPEN, allows users to access all contributions to major standards such as 3GPP, MPEG, IEEE, and IETF.

Download Unified Consulting’s Wi-Fi Economic Report slides presented at this year’s Corporate IP Strategy Conference in November.