Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cisco Sued over OFDM Wireless Standards

Posted by simoniker on from the floating-through-the-ether dept.

Agent Green writes "It's definitely not the first time someone has been sued over a standard, but Wi-LAN is in the process of taking Cisco to court over the OFDM encoding which it claims to have patents for - the standards in question apply to 802.11a/g. Interestingly, this case is being brought in Canada, where the defense needs to prove its case. Might be time to join and expand the patent busting brigade?"

1 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Cisco's Patent by femto · · Score: 4, Informative
    I happen to be one of the university team which developed Cisco's OFDM technology.

    FYI here is the patent which covers that work. My name is not on it. At the time, it was the concept of a wireless version of Ethernet that was seen to be novel. Others had low speed networks (packet radio). High speed wireless point-to-point links also existed. As far as we knew, noone had yet tried to build something that was a network AND high speed.

    Anyway, that was my understanding at the time. As is usual, most parties were playing their cards close to their chest, so there could have been others. The only other one I knew of at the time was the Bereley InfoPad. I'll be as interested as anyone else to see of the patent survives the challenge.

    I don't like the current patent mess, but the Cisco patent at least was real in that itwas not speculative. There was a serious R&D effort behind it (as shown by the fact that product was produced).