The Wi-Fi 6/7 Patent Pool War: When Sisvel and Avanci Compete for the Same Standard

In the early months of 2026, something unprecedented happened in the world of wireless technology licensing: two major patent pool administrators—Sisvel and Avanci—both announced competing patent pools for the same technical standard, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7. Two rival toll booths appeared on the same road. Two warlords planted their flags on the same hill.

For anyone who follows standard essential patents (SEPs), this was both astonishing and, on reflection, entirely predictable. The Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pool war crystallizes every tension that has been building in the SEP licensing world for two decades: Who gets to define what a “fair” royalty is? Who controls access to the technologies that connect billions of devices? And what happens when the market itself becomes the battlefield?

Welcome back to the IP detective’s office. Today’s case file: the Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pool war, and what it tells us about the future of standard essential patents.

Background: What Is a Patent Pool, and Why Do They Matter?

Before we can understand the war, we need to understand the weapons. A patent pool is an arrangement among multiple patent holders to license their patents collectively, typically through a single administrative entity, to anyone who wants to implement a technical standard.

Patent pools emerged as a solution to a real problem. Modern technical standards—whether for Wi-Fi, cellular networks, video codecs, or optical discs—involve contributions from hundreds of companies, each holding patents on portions of the standard. Without a pool, a device manufacturer implementing Wi-Fi 6 would theoretically need to identify every patent holder whose invention is embodied in the standard, negotiate individual licenses with each, and hope that each holder’s royalty demand was reasonable and non-discriminatory. This is practically impossible, and the resulting “patent thicket” would make implementing standards economically infeasible.

Patent pools solve this by aggregating licenses. The pool administrator collects patents from participating holders, certifies them as truly essential to the standard, sets a collective licensing rate, and offers “one-stop shopping” to implementers. Device manufacturers pay one rate, get covered for all pooled patents, and can focus on building products.

The two major players in this story have different histories and philosophies:

Sisvel is an Italian patent licensing entity founded in 1982, originally to manage patents related to color television. Over decades, it expanded into audio technologies (MP3, AAC), video codecs, and wireless communications. Sisvel operates several Wi-Fi related patent pools, including pools covering Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 (802.11n/ac) technologies. By 2026, it had established significant infrastructure and relationships in the wireless SEP space.

Avanci is a newer entrant, launched in 2016, initially focused on IoT (Internet of Things) device licensing. Avanci pioneered the concept of a one-stop licensing platform specifically for cellular SEPs—particularly for connected cars and IoT devices. Its 5G IoT platform, launched around 2022, attracted participation from virtually every major cellular patent holder including Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, InterDigital, and Samsung. Avanci’s success in cellular IoT made it a powerful force in the SEP licensing industry.

When Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) and Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) emerged as commercially significant standards, both Sisvel and Avanci saw an opportunity. The result was the first major patent pool collision in wireless technology history.

The Standards at Stake: Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7

To understand why the Wi-Fi 6/7 patents are worth fighting over, we need to understand what these standards are and how commercially important they have become.

Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax), finalized in 2019, represented a major generational leap from Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). Key innovations included:

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which allows a single access point to communicate with multiple devices simultaneously on different sub-channels—dramatically improving efficiency in dense environments like airports, stadiums, and apartment buildings. This was a fundamental change in the Wi-Fi architecture, borrowed from cellular technology, and it generated numerous patentable inventions.

Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) in both uplink and downlink directions, allowing an access point to simultaneously transmit and receive from multiple devices using antenna beamforming techniques. Again, substantial patent territory.

Target Wake Time (TWT), which allows devices to negotiate scheduled wake-up times with the access point, dramatically extending battery life for IoT devices. This is particularly commercially important because it makes Wi-Fi 6 viable for battery-powered sensors and devices that previously required Bluetooth or proprietary low-power protocols.

Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be), finalized in 2024, pushed even further:

Multi-Link Operation (MLO), allowing devices to transmit and receive on multiple bands (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz) simultaneously, dramatically increasing throughput and reliability. MLO is perhaps the single biggest architectural change in Wi-Fi since 802.11n introduced MIMO, and it represents an enormous patent landscape.

320 MHz channel bandwidth (double Wi-Fi 6’s maximum), enabling theoretical throughputs exceeding 46 Gbps. New QAM-4096 modulation. Enhanced Multi-Link Single Radio (EMLSR) operation.

Together, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 are expected to be the dominant wireless connectivity technologies for consumer electronics, enterprise networking, smart home devices, and connected vehicles for the next decade. The global Wi-Fi chipset market was projected to exceed $20 billion annually by 2026, with Wi-Fi 6/7 chips commanding an increasing share. The royalty opportunity for patent holders is enormous—which is precisely why two patent pool administrators decided to compete for control of it.

The Collision: Competing Pools for the Same Standard

In early 2026, both Sisvel and Avanci publicly announced Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pools. Both claimed to offer “one-stop licensing” for Wi-Fi 6/7 SEPs. Both had attracted major patent holders as members. And both were seeking to sign up implementers—the device manufacturers and chipmakers who need licenses to make and sell Wi-Fi 6/7 products.

This created an immediate legal and commercial problem. If a device manufacturer licenses from Pool A but not Pool B, and Pool B holds patents that are truly essential to Wi-Fi 6/7, the manufacturer remains exposed to infringement claims from Pool B members. Conversely, if manufacturers must take licenses from both pools, the cumulative royalty burden doubles—potentially making it commercially unviable to implement the standard at all.

The competing pools also created a coordination problem for patent holders. A company that contributes its Wi-Fi 6/7 SEPs to Sisvel’s pool cannot simultaneously contribute them to Avanci’s pool. (Or can it? This question—whether the same patent can be licensed through multiple pools simultaneously—became one of the central legal disputes in the emerging conflict.) Patent holders had to choose which pool to join, and those choices would determine whether the pools were truly comprehensive or merely partial solutions.

This is not merely a business problem. Under the FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) obligations that attach to most SEPs, patent holders who contributed to the IEEE standard-setting process made commitments to license their SEPs on FRAND terms. Those obligations exist regardless of which pool structure is used—but they become fiendishly complicated when there are competing pools both claiming to represent “FRAND compliance.”

The History Behind This: How We Got Here

Competing patent pools for the same standard are unusual, but the underlying tension is not new. In the video codec world, competing patent pools for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (Via Licensing vs. MPEG-LA) and HEVC/H.265 (HEVC Advance vs. MPEG-LA) have created exactly this kind of multi-pool complexity, contributing to the industry’s eventual shift to royalty-free codecs like VP9 and AV1.

In the cellular SEP world, Avanci’s success was built partly on the failure of previous pool attempts. The 3G Patent Platform Partnership and related initiatives attempted to create comprehensive pools for 3G/4G standards but were never fully embraced by major patent holders who preferred bilateral licensing—often at higher rates than any pool would offer. Avanci succeeded in the IoT/automotive context partly because the patent holders believed the pool rate was acceptable and the administrative convenience was real.

The Wi-Fi context has a different dynamic. Wi-Fi is largely an enterprise and consumer technology—the end devices are smart TVs, laptops, phones, and home routers, not industrial IoT sensors or connected cars. The implementers are large consumer electronics companies with experienced IP counsel and the resources to litigate. The stakes on both sides are higher, and the tolerance for pool arrangements that don’t serve implementers’ interests is lower.

The SEP Essentiality Question: Are These Patents Really Essential?

One of the most contentious issues in any patent pool is the question of essentiality: Is each patent in the pool truly essential to the standard? A patent is “standard essential” if it is technically impossible to implement the standard without infringing the patent—regardless of design choice or implementation detail.

The problem is that essentiality declarations are largely self-reported. Standard-setting organizations like IEEE receive thousands of Patent Declaration letters from companies asserting that their patents may be essential to a standard. Many of these assertions are made preemptively, before the standard is finalized, and before detailed claim charts have been prepared. The IEEE does not independently verify essentiality claims.

Academic studies have consistently found that a substantial percentage of declared SEPs are not actually essential. A 2020 study by ETSI examining 4G LTE SEP declarations found that only about 50-60% of declared-essential patents were likely actually essential when examined in detail. Similar figures have been found in Wi-Fi studies.

This creates a critical vulnerability in any patent pool’s claim to comprehensiveness. If Sisvel’s pool includes 200 patents declared essential to Wi-Fi 6, but only 120 of those are actually essential, a manufacturer who licenses from Sisvel may still be exposed to infringement claims from the 80 non-essential patents (which may be infringed by some implementations even if not essential to the standard) and from any actually essential patents that Sisvel’s pool missed.

Both Sisvel and Avanci have claimed rigorous essentiality review processes, but these processes differ in methodology and are conducted by paid consultants with an inherent interest in maximizing the pool’s apparent coverage. The competing claims about which pool is “more comprehensive” or has “better essentiality review” are not easily verifiable by outside parties.

The FRAND Obligation: What “Fair and Reasonable” Really Means

At the heart of SEP licensing is the FRAND commitment. When a company participates in the IEEE standard-setting process and discloses that it holds patents that may be essential to the standard, it undertakes an obligation to license those patents on FRAND terms to anyone who wants to implement the standard. This obligation “runs with the patent”—it transfers to any subsequent assignee of the patent.

The problem is that FRAND is not a number. It is a constraint—a set of properties (fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory) that a royalty must satisfy. Two experienced economists, given the same patent portfolio and the same standard, may compute FRAND royalties that differ by an order of magnitude. Courts in different jurisdictions have employed different methodologies for computing FRAND rates:

The top-down approach (favored by some European courts) starts from an estimate of the total reasonable royalty burden on the standard and divides it by the number of essential patents to arrive at a per-patent rate. This approach tends to produce lower royalty rates, because it caps the aggregate burden and distributes it across all SEP holders.

The comparable license approach (favored by US courts in decisions like Ericsson v. D-Link, Fed. Cir. 2014) looks at actual licenses negotiated in the market to determine a rate that is consistent with market practice. This approach tends to produce higher rates, because it anchors to licenses that were negotiated under conditions that may have included hold-up concerns.

The incremental value approach attempts to isolate the marginal contribution of each patented technology above the next-best alternative. This is economically sound in principle but practically very difficult to implement, requiring detailed technical and economic analysis of each patent.

The competing Wi-Fi 6/7 pools were offering different rates, and each was claiming that its rate was the “FRAND rate.” This put device manufacturers in an impossible position: they might be simultaneously faced with a FRAND claim from Sisvel at rate X and a FRAND claim from Avanci at rate Y, where X and Y together exceeded any defensible estimate of the total FRAND burden on Wi-Fi 6/7 implementations.

Hold-Up, Hold-Out, and the Economics of SEP Licensing

The economics of SEP licensing are bedeviled by two competing concerns that push in opposite directions.

Patent hold-up is the concern that SEP holders can extract excessive royalties by threatening to enjoin products that implement a standard—after manufacturers have already sunk the costs of implementing that standard. Because switching away from a standard is prohibitively expensive once products are in market, the patent holder can demand royalties far above what would be “fair” compensation for the value of the invention. FRAND commitments were designed to address hold-up, but critics argue they have been imperfectly enforced.

Patent hold-out (or “reverse hold-up”) is the mirror concern: that large implementers with market power can refuse to negotiate FRAND licenses in good faith, knowing that the cost and delay of SEP litigation is prohibitive for many patent holders. Under this view, FRAND commitments are used as a shield to avoid paying any royalties at all, and the real unfairness in the market runs the other direction.

The competing Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pools operate in this contested economic landscape. Implementers who welcome a pool structure as a way to achieve licensing certainty at a reasonable aggregate cost may find that competing pools offer no such certainty—they simply create a second set of demands to negotiate around.

Patent holders who join one pool may find that their FRAND obligations require them to license to any implementer who requests—including implementers who are trying to take advantage of pool competition to play the two pools off against each other. This is not a hypothetical: sophisticated implementers have been known to use the existence of competing license offers to argue that the “market rate” is the lower of the two, even if neither pool is comprehensive.

Global Enforcement: Where Courts Stand

The Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pool war is playing out in a highly complex jurisdictional landscape. Courts in different countries have very different approaches to SEP enforcement, and SEP holders have become skilled at selecting favorable forums.

Germany has historically been the most favorable jurisdiction for SEP holders. German courts have been willing to issue injunctions against infringing implementers while FRAND license terms are still being negotiated, creating enormous pressure to settle. The German Supreme Court’s decision in Sisvel v. Haier (2021) established a framework for when an injunction is appropriate in FRAND cases, holding that a patent holder must make a “FRAND offer” before seeking an injunction—but that the implementer must also engage in “constructive” license negotiations. This framework has been criticized by implementers as tilting the playing field toward patent holders.

The United Kingdom has developed a sophisticated FRAND litigation framework, building on the landmark Unwired Planet v. Huawei decisions (UK Supreme Court, 2020). UK courts are willing to determine global FRAND rates—meaning that a UK judgment sets a worldwide licensing rate for the patent holder’s SEP portfolio—and to grant injunctions against implementers who refuse to accept a UK court’s FRAND rate determination. This has made the UK a powerful venue for SEP holders.

The United States presents a more complex picture. The Supreme Court’s decision in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange (2006) made it harder to obtain permanent injunctions in patent cases, which reduced the hold-up leverage of SEP holders in US courts. However, the Federal Trade Commission’s Qualcomm case and subsequent proceedings have addressed SEP licensing practices under competition law, adding an antitrust dimension to FRAND disputes.

China has been increasingly active in SEP cases, with courts willing to set global FRAND rates (as in Huawei v. InterDigital, Shenzhen, 2013, and subsequent cases). Given that China is the world’s largest market for consumer electronics and Wi-Fi devices, favorable Chinese forum selection has become a strategic priority for patent holders with significant portfolios there.

The existence of competing Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pools will complicate this jurisdictional picture significantly. A manufacturer facing infringement claims from Sisvel in Germany, Avanci in the UK, and individual pool members in US courts simultaneously will face extraordinary coordination challenges and costs.

The Chipmaker Problem: Where the Real Battle Is

In the Wi-Fi licensing world, there’s a strategic question that doesn’t get enough attention: where in the supply chain should SEP licenses be taken?

Wi-Fi chipmakers—companies like Qualcomm (Wi-Fi + cellular), MediaTek, Broadcom, and Intel—embed Wi-Fi functionality at the semiconductor level. If chipmakers hold licenses to the Wi-Fi 6/7 SEPs, their downstream customers (laptop makers, router makers, smartphone manufacturers) benefit from patent exhaustion: the patent rights are exhausted upon the first authorized sale, and downstream purchasers get a free pass.

This is not merely theoretical. In the cellular context, a major dispute over whether licenses should be at the chip level or device level was central to the FTC’s antitrust case against Qualcomm (FTC v. Qualcomm, N.D. Cal. 2019). Judge Koh found that Qualcomm’s refusal to license its SEPs to competing chipmakers constituted anticompetitive conduct—though the Ninth Circuit reversed on appeal in 2020, finding that Qualcomm’s conduct did not violate antitrust law.

In the Wi-Fi context, both Sisvel and Avanci must decide whether to license at the chip level or the device level. Device-level licensing means higher royalty per unit (smartphones cost more than chips) but exposes the pool to the exhaustion argument if chipmakers are licensed elsewhere. Chip-level licensing is more efficient and creates clean exhaustion chains, but yields lower absolute dollars per licensed unit.

The competing pools appear to be taking different approaches to this question, which adds yet another layer of complexity to manufacturers trying to understand their license obligations.

Implications for the Internet of Things and the Connected Home

The stakes of the Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pool war extend well beyond smartphones and laptops. Wi-Fi 6’s TWT feature and Wi-Fi 7’s MLO capabilities make these standards increasingly important for:

Smart home devices: Video doorbells, smart thermostats, security cameras, and other IoT devices are increasingly using Wi-Fi 6 for the combination of high throughput (needed for video) and low power (needed for battery operation). A $0.50/unit royalty, which might be trivial for a $1,000 smartphone, is devastating for a $30 smart bulb.

Connected vehicles: Wi-Fi 7’s speed and reliability make it attractive for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication and in-car entertainment systems. Automotive SEP licensing has already been contentious (the Avanci automotive platform has faced litigation from several automakers), and adding Wi-Fi SEPs to the automotive licensing stack will intensify existing disputes.

Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0: Factory floors, logistics facilities, and healthcare environments are deploying Wi-Fi 6 to support real-time monitoring, robotic systems, and remote diagnostics. The cumulative licensing burden on a large industrial Wi-Fi deployment could be substantial if not managed carefully.

For all of these applications, licensing certainty and predictable costs are critical for business planning. The existence of competing, potentially incomplete patent pools creates exactly the uncertainty that these industries cannot tolerate.

What Should Happen? The Detective’s Prescription

As your IP detective, let me offer a diagnosis and prescription for the Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pool situation.

The fundamental problem is a coordination failure. Patent pools exist to solve coordination problems—getting all necessary licensors into a single structure so that implementers can get complete coverage. Two competing pools simply relocate the coordination problem: instead of negotiating with 200 individual patent holders, implementers must now navigate two competing pool structures, neither of which may be complete.

The solution is consolidation. The IEEE, the relevant patent holders, and implementer representatives should work together to establish a single, comprehensive patent pool with independent essentiality review, transparent rate-setting methodology, and a governance structure that gives appropriate representation to both patent holders and implementers. This is the model that has worked best in other contexts—the MPEG-LA pool for MPEG-2 is perhaps the clearest example of a well-functioning patent pool that served everyone’s interests.

Failing that, regulators—particularly competition authorities in the EU, the US, and Japan—should pay close attention to whether the competing pool structure is being used as a mechanism for patent hold-up, and whether the aggregate royalty burden imposed by the two pools combined exceeds any defensible FRAND rate for Wi-Fi 6/7.

The Japanese Perspective: Wi-Fi Patents and the Global Patent War

Japan has a significant stake in the Wi-Fi 6/7 patent landscape. Japanese companies—particularly NTT, Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp—hold substantial patent portfolios in wireless communications, though their positions in Wi-Fi SEPs are generally not as dominant as their positions in cellular (4G/5G) SEPs.

Japan’s domestic market is also heavily affected by the outcome of the Wi-Fi 6/7 licensing wars. Japanese consumer electronics companies—from Sony to Fujitsu—are major manufacturers of Wi-Fi-enabled devices and must navigate whatever licensing regime emerges. Japan’s experience with earlier SEP licensing disputes, particularly in the cellular space where Japanese companies like NTT DoCoMo have been both licensors and licensees, gives Japanese IP practitioners a nuanced understanding of these issues.

Japan’s Patent Office has also been active in developing guidelines for FRAND licensing and SEP enforcement that reflect Japanese interests in both the patent holder and implementer dimensions. How Japanese courts handle any Wi-Fi 6/7 SEP cases—if and when they are filed—will add another jurisdictional data point to the global mosaic.

Conclusion: The Patent Pool War as a Window Into SEP’s Future

The Wi-Fi 6/7 patent pool war is not just a business dispute between two licensing entities. It is a window into the fundamental tensions of the standard essential patent system—tensions that have existed since the dawn of modern standards-setting and that have never been fully resolved.

Standards create enormous value by enabling interoperability. But they also create an asymmetric dynamic: once a standard is adopted, the patents embedded in it become critical infrastructure, and their holders acquire leverage that goes far beyond what a normal patent grants. Patent pools were invented to manage that leverage. But competing patent pools may amplify it, creating dueling toll booths on the road to technological implementation.

The resolution of the Wi-Fi 6/7 pool conflict will have implications that extend far beyond wireless networking. Whatever framework emerges—consolidation, regulatory intervention, bilateral licensing, or continued conflict—will set precedents for how the next generation of connected technology standards is licensed. As Wi-Fi becomes the backbone of the smart home, the connected vehicle, and the industrial IoT, getting this right matters enormously.

For the IP detective, the investigation of who owns what in Wi-Fi 6/7, and who gets to collect the royalties, is one of the most intricate puzzles in the current patent landscape. The game is afoot—and the stakes have never been higher.

探偵くん will be watching which pool wins—or whether someone finds a way to drain them both.