SEP Essentials

Since I have been so focused of late on Huawei’s conduct in the IEEE, I noticed two recent Huawei deals.  They have been treated as unrelated, but I wonder whether they are, in fact, part and parcel of Huawei’s SEP strategy.  Hence my title: pirates on the move.  1. Nokia acquires Wi-Fi 7 related patents from Huawei .  Buried in an announcement from Nokia that was posted on December 11, 2025 ( New Wi-Fi licensing deals in automotive | Nokia ) is this statement: “In additio

Today I sent a letter to the IEEE about the email sent by Andrew Woodward, a patent portfolio manager at Huawei Canada, to the 802.11 reflector on or around November 10, 2025 (“Huawei email”) which I have previously posted about (see The Huawei IEEE Scandal: Is Huawei a Buccaneer or a Privateer? and IEEE Sanctions - the Huawei Vote Stuffing Scandal Part 2 ) . I sent the letter to the Senior Counsel for the IEEE Standards Association who emailed the 802 LMSC reflector (which

This situation represents a major test for the IEEE SA processes — and ultimately whether the IEEE SA has the guts to appropriately discipline parties that violate the IEEE SA rules, potentially including Huawei as a company. It is far past time that the IEEE police itself, and the behavior of its participants. 

The IEEE is a consensus organization “dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.” [1]  And that is how Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) started: with a bunch of dreamers and idealists who wanted to create new technology to make everyone’s life easier.  They worked under a set of rules that allowed every individual who came to enough meetings to vote on proposals and required that each of these individuals vote their conscience, rather than voting in a block to protect

In Andrew Myles’ guest post ( Convergence and Competition - A Tale of Two Standards Part 4 - Guest Post by Andrew Myles ), he discussed the six companies that have failed to respond to ISO’s request to confirm whether or not they will grant a FRAND license for their Wi-Fi 6 SEPs.  I recently took a look into the Chinese ISO holdout Huawei ( Convergence and Competition - A Tale of Two Standards Part 5: Huawei ) and now want to focus on the "Nordic companies" [1] that are ISO h

In Andrew Myles’ guest post ( Convergence and Competition - A Tale of Two Standards Part 4 - Guest Post by Andrew Myles ), he discussed the six companies that have failed to provide a formal response to ISO’s request to confirm whether or not they will grant a FRAND license for their Wi-Fi 6 SEPs.  It’s time to take a deeper dive into some of those six companies.  To remind you, those six companies are: ·        Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (“Huawei,” based out of China), · 

Way back when I first started this blog, I interviewed Andrew Myles  (see Interview with Andrew Myles - Part 1  and Interview with Andrew Myles - Part 2 ). As I noted in those posts, Andrew was a contributor to the IEEE 802.11 Working Group for more than twenty years and has also spent a great deal of time in recent years working to promote peaceful coexistence between Wi-Fi, cellular and other radio based telecommunications standards as the Chair of the IEEE 802.11 Coexisten

For years the cellular and Wifi standards peacefully co-existed with different uses (voice vs data) and different technological strengths (see, Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 1 (the Early Years: Peaceful Co-Existence) ( sepessentials.com ) ).  But over time, the technologies used in the standards, and the applications for which the standards are used, have converged (see, Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 2 (Convergence of

In Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 1 (the Early Years: Peaceful Co-Existence) ( sepessentials.com ) , I discussed the early peaceful co-existence of two of the world’s most important telecommunications standards, cellular and WiFi, in the early days of each standard.   In those days, WiFi and cellular carried different types of information (data vs voice) using different protocols (IP vs circuit switched) on different portions of the spectrum (unlic

Two of the world’s most important telecommunications standards - cellular and WiFi - have gone from complementary coexistence to escalating competition with each other.  At the same time, the participants in cellular and WiFi standard development, the technology itself, and the applications of the technology, have begun converging.  At stake is the lucrative IoT market – a winner take all market that does not need the same bells and whistles as smart phones or even connected

I recently attended the Global Standards Leadership Conference organized by Justus Baron (Northwestern University), Kirti Gupta (Cornerstone Research, previously at Qualcomm), and Tim Pohlmann (LexisNexis® IPlytics) which took place on June 13, 2024, at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.  It was an interesting and well-attended conference with a number of different panels and a keynote speaker from UC-Berkeley.  Here are some of the more notewort

There is a persistent narrative in some quarters that you need to “balance” the needs of SEP holders and implementers [1] in order to encourage innovation and standards development. Their point seems to be that large numbers of innovative companies will not participate in standards development unless motivated by the ability to earn big bucks (or other currencies) from licensing their SEPs to implementers. This seems improbable: vanishingly few entities that do not plan to

We are back with Andrew Myles. Please see my Interview with Andrew Myles – Part 1 for information about Andrew and his background. My first set of questions relates to how things have changed over the time you have been involved in standard development. Let’s start with participation in the meetings. What have you seen change over time related to who participates in standards development? One thing that has really changed in the 802.11 development effort is that some compa

What is the purpose of a standard? “The focus of standards development should be the benefit of humanity.” Andrew Myles (quoting from the IEEE’s mission statement ). Andrew Myles has been involved in standards development for decades, starting in the late 1980s. He has been a contributor to ANSI’s FDDI development (ANSI X3T9.5), to the IETF’s Mobile-IP development group, a very long time contributor to IEEE’s 802.11 working group, to 3GPP’s RAN1 Technical Specification Grou