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September 21, 2007

802.11n Woes Due to Australian Patent?

By Glenn Fleishman

The Register reports that there’s trouble in the IEEE 802.11 Task Group N over CSIRO’s patents: The technology agency of the Australian government owns a patent that they have asserted covers some elements of 802.11n, specifically multipath data transmission—a key part of MIMO technology. The Register writes that an overarching IEEE board is highly concerned about proceeding with 802.11n while CSIRO hasn’t responded to a request from the engineering group to forego lawsuits over intellectual property that might be part of the standard.

CSIRO won a lawsuit and injunction against Buffalo on the matter of this patent some months ago, but that’s the only notable success, and Buffalo has appealed. Other firms have, in turned, preemptively sued CSIRO. Cisco is exempt because as part of an acquisition of an Australian company, they assumed a patent payment responsibility to CSIRO, thus Linksys is in the catbird’s seat.

Update, Sept. 27: Likely not to slow things down, IDG News Service reports. In fact, it’s more likely CSIRO benefits from ensuring that devices are on the market it could collect royalties from.

Posted by Glennf at September 21, 2007 4:00 PM

Categories: Task Group N

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