Wi-Fi standards face patent threat

There is a long drawn out lawsuit in place affecting some manufacturers ability to deliver Wi-Fi product from their warehouses. This also affects the release and finalization of Draft-N, and if the suit is won, will affect any manufacturer of Wi-Fi equipment with higher prices due to the licensing fees they will have to pay.

According to a ZDNET article referenced below, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency, holds a patent on Wi-Fi and filed a lawsuit against Buffalo Technology, which is fighting CSIRO's patent claims. In 2005, Dell, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Netgear sued CSIRO in federal court in San Francisco to invalidate the patent. The patent describes the implementation of several aspects of the 802.11a and 802.11g wireless standards developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

ZDNET has the most detailed explanation I have found. You can see it here.

Buffalo Technology has been hit hard by the suit, as you can read here.

As Buffalo states in the above link,
"CSIRO's lawsuits are against the entire wireless LAN industry and could affect the supply of wireless LAN products by any manufacturer, not just Buffalo. The entire industry is resisting CSIRO's attempts to enjoin the sale of wireless LAN products. Recently, Microsoft, 3COM Corporation, SMC Networks, Accton Technology Corporation, Intel, Atheros Communications, Belkin International, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel Networks, Nvidia Corporation, Oracle Corporation, SAP AG, Yahoo, Nokia, and the Consumer Electronics Association filed briefs in support of Buffalo's position that injunctive relief is inappropriate in this case."

Other suits may follow. The net result is if you can afford Draft-N equipment now, get it. One day it may be ratified, and the distance and speed throughput available today are great if you need to do intra-network large (several hundred megabytes) file transfers or video streaming.

If you are of a more cautious nature, wait to see how the dust settles on this lawsuit and how it affects Wi-Fi product pricing.

 

Sounds like Rambus all over again. Adoption of a global standard should automatically invalidate any patents.