Wi-Fi 6 Essentiality Report: Manual Assessment of all Patents with Wi-Fi 6 Standard

MOHALI, India, Oct. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Scintillation Research has conducted an independent, non-commissioned study on Wi-Fi 6 technology and prepared a detailed report on the essentiality of Wi-Fi 6 for various stakeholders.

The report offers a comprehensive overview of the Wi-Fi 6 patent landscape, providing detailed insights into its key patents. It aims to identify all granted patents worldwide related to Wi-Fi 6 technology and deliver actionable, reliable information on essential patents to stakeholders, supporting their various campaigns. The report highlights top assignees, their share of essential patents, examines portfolios within this space, and reviews the history of patent reassignments.

Who will benefit from this report:

• SEP Holders: To understand leading assignees, their portfolios, and develop licensing strategies.
• SEP Implementers: To identify potential threats, FTO issues, and plan licensing negotiations.
• Patent Monetisation Firms: To find assignees and relevant portfolios for monetisation.
• Law Firms: To develop litigation strategies for assertion or defence.
• Patent Pools: To identify potential licensors to join their pool.
• AI Software Firms: To train their AI models with our comprehensive datasets.

Our Methodology:

Although IEEE maintains a database of LoAs submitted by patent holders, these declarations do not fully reflect the actual landscape of a particular technology. Therefore, we recognized the need to create a patent landscape relevant to the Wi-Fi 6 standard. We employed a four-phase approach to conduct this detailed study.

Phase 1

A comprehensive dataset of active, granted worldwide patents was built by covering the newly added features of the Wi-Fi 6 standard. Based on several publicly available reports, we identified the following features as new additions in 802.11ax compared to the previous standard, 802.11ac:

• Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)
• Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO)
• Target Wake Time (TWT)
• Beamforming
• Basic Service Set (BSS) Colouring
• 1024 QAM
• 160 MHz
• Spatial Streams

A four-step approach was followed during Phase 1 to create a comprehensive patent dataset :

Step 1: Extract all patents listed under LoAs declared to 802.11ax or 802.11 2020.

Step 2: Extract patents from the list published by Sisvel as of March 21, 2025.

Step 3: Extract all patents listed on the Atlas Global website.

Step 4: Identify patent families using combinations of keywords, CPCs, assignees, and citations, with a focus on the newly added features. We restricted our key strings to a priority date of 'on or before Feb 2021' to match the approval date of 802.11ax.

After combining all results from Steps 1-3, we compiled a list of over 3,000 patent families. We recognised the terminology similarities between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 technologies; therefore, we expected a substantial number of telecom patents to be captured in Step 3 as well.

Phase 2

An analysis of the title, abstract, and claims of each patent was conducted to identify patents with limitations related to telecommunications terminology or concepts, such as LTE, UMTS, PDCCH, PDSCH, and similar. Such patents were removed from our list. However, patents written with broad terminology or concepts applicable to both telecom and Wi-Fi 6 technologies were considered for further analysis.

Additionally, several patent families related to coordinated beamforming, 320 MHz, EHT, MLO, and similar concepts were identified, which are also associated with the WiFi-7 standard and were excluded from the list.

After removing irrelevant patents, the refined list comprised 2011 patent families, including over 35 patent families declared to ETSI under various telecom specifications.

Phase 3

Categorisation of all 2,011 patents was performed based on newly added features, including Beamforming, MU-MIMO, spatial streams, OFDMA, and 160 MHz, among others.

Phase 4

A detailed manual analysis of each patent family in the list was performed without utilising any AI algorithm to determine the essentiality of the claims with respect to 802.11-2020 or 802.11ax. Our team reviewed each patent family in detail and assessed its essentiality, providing rationale and excerpts from the relevant standards to support their findings. When evidence for each claim limitation was identified in the standard, we mark the family as essential and proceed to the next one. If a particular independent claim is found to be non-essential to the standard due to certain claim limitations, we reviewed the following independent claim for analysis purposes. Further, if no independent claim of that patent was found to be essential, we reviewed the other granted family member for essentiality purposes. We have marked a particular patent family as non-essential only after reviewing all granted family members.

Several insights were derived from the analysis and were documented in the report. Some of the key findings include:

• Over 1000 patent families are essential to the Wi-Fi 6 standard.
• 45 unique assignees own at least one Wi-Fi 6 essential patent.
• Wi-Fi 6 essential patents are also declared to ETSI under multiple 3GPP standards.
• Distribution of essential patents by technology.
• Reassignment history of essential patents.
• Interactive dashboard.

A complete report is available: WiFi-6 Essentiality Report.  

Additionally, an essentiality analysis report is compiled for certain assignees to offer a comprehensive overview of their Wi-Fi 6 portfolio. This report covers all patent families selected for manual review, along with their essentiality status. Specifically, it includes details such as patent number, priority date, title, evaluated independent claim, essentiality status, reasoning behind the assessment, and relevant excerpts from the standard.

The essentiality report of assignees, along with a sample analysis, is available as follows:    

1. Huawei 
2. LG
3. Intel
4. Qualcomm
5. Panasonic
6. Samsung
7. Sony
8. Ericsson
9. NXP
10. InterDigital
11. Mediatek
12. ZTE
13. Apple
14. Wilus
15. Marvell
16. HP
17. Cisco
18. Toshiba
19. Canon
20. Avago
21. International Semiconductor

A complete dataset is also available. If you have a customised request, please feel free to contact us at info@sraas.com. 

About Scintillation Research:

Scintillation Research, founded in 2010, is an innovation consultancy firm that provides market and patent research to a diverse range of stakeholders worldwide. We serve Fortune 500 companies, law firms, brokerage firms, inventors, universities, and consulting firms globally. Our core services include strategic prosecution support, patent landscape analysis, competitive advantage reports, competitor intelligence, portfolio mining, technology scouting, ecosystem mapping, essentiality evaluation of patents, claim charts, infringement searches, freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis, product reverse engineering, and prior-art searches. Our offerings deliver comprehensive solutions across all technology sectors, ensuring clients receive customised support and innovative insights. To learn more about our services, please feel free to contact us at: info@sraas.com

To find out more, visit www.scintillationresearch.com or follow us on LinkedIn

Contact:
Mr. Bikramjit Singh
Director, Scintillation Research
31, 10^th Floor, TDI Business Centre
Mohali, India - 160055
Email: bikramjit.singh@sraas.com
Phone: +91 172 297 2262

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