Stories about: Wi-LAN

Patent trolls beware: Some of the tech industry's biggest names are banding together to run you out of court.

Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Minerva Industries, a Los Angeles-based patent-holding firm. On the same day it received the patent, Minerva proceeded to sue 33 companies for patent infringement.

High-profile patent disputes are a common occurrence in today's telecom industry, from NTP suing RIM to Wi-LAN suing Cisco, to everyone suing Vonage. But author and science journalist Seth Shulman contends that dodgy patenting in the telecom industry extends all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell, who Shulman alleges fraudulently obtained a process used by a rival inventor to build the world's first working telephone.

As if there weren't enough patent lawsuits flying around the telecommunications industry, Wi-LAN announced last week it has filed suit against 22 companies.

The WiMax Forum should finish validating its system for certification testing next week, a senior official said, the latest milestone on the road to a technology that at times has suffered from overly optimistic expectations.

Wi-LAN, a Canadian wireless network vendor, filed a patent lawsuit against Cisco Systems on Wednesday and is taking aim at much of the wireless LAN business as well as the emerging wireless broadband industry.

Major chip and wireless equipment manufacturers Tuesday announced plans to back development of standards-based wireless metropolitan-area network (MAN) products that can provide 70Mbit/sec. of broadband data over a 30-mile range to customers -- and the equipment needed to access the service could be as cheap as today's wireless LAN access cards.

Wi-LAN Inc. and 4G Network Technologies announced a US$31 million, five-year deal here at SuperComm under which Wi-LAN will provide wireless broadband access products to a cellular network that 4G Network Technologies plans to build.