The companies that developed the latest and greatest Wi-Fi technologies have lined up behind our Wi-Fi Multimode programme as both licensors and licensees

“Who is leading the Wi-Fi 7 patent race?”, asks a new report from LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. Published last week, the study is sure to catch the eye of anyone involved in Wi-Fi patent licensing.

Sisvel was not involved with the report and cannot endorse its findings; we have no visibility on the underlying data or the detailed methodology used to compile it.

However, we do have a few observations based on the public summary of the report and the accompanying media coverage.

An island of transparency

The stated aim of the study is to address the limited transparency in the SEP landscape. For reasons explained by the authors, this issue is especially pronounced when it comes to Wi-Fi: “92% of IEEE Wi-Fi patent declarations are blanket statements that do not identify specific patents.”

The report suggests that Sisvel’s Wi-Fi Multimode patent pool is a vital reference point for both SEP information and royalty rates.

Sisvel’s compliant finished-product royalty rates ($0.50 for Wi-Fi 6 and $0.60 for Wi-Fi 7) are the only pricing benchmarks provided in the study. These serve as a starting point for the authors to estimate a total royalty stack. This is a clear benefit to the ecosystem – one which becomes possible only when pools make their rates public.

Even more crucially, LexisNexis produced its model of the Wi-Fi patent landscape using an AI classifier and the methodology lists two types of data used to train this AI tool:

• “True positive examples, such as pooled Wi-Fi patents”; and

• “True negative examples, including wireless patents unrelated to Wi-Fi.”

Sisvel is the only pool operator that has published a patent brochure listing Wi-Fi rights certified as essential by third-party evaluators. We did this under our Wi-Fi 6 programme and continue to do so for Wi-Fi Multimode.

This information can be used by anyone, including commercial providers such as LexisNexis, to gain a better understanding not only of the portfolios in the pool but also of the landscape as a whole. So, this is another example of how the whole market benefits when pools – and the patent owners that establish them – operate in accordance with time-tested standards for transparency.

Pool covers significant share of the stack

The LexisNexis report does not disclose hard numbers or shares of patents held by the companies in its Wi-Fi patent league table – only their ranking. However, it does state that the 10 patent owners participating in the Sisvel Wi-Fi Multimode programme account for “roughly one-fifth of the overall patent landscape”.

Again, we haven’t seen the data that this is based on. However, Sisvel has published a royalty explanation for the Wi-Fi Multimode programme, which examines Sisvel licensors’ share of the stack through the lens of contributions to the relevant technical standards. The figures show that Wi-Fi Multimode patent owners were responsible for 30.7% of the technical contributions to the Wi-Fi 7 standard – more than double their share of Wi-Fi 6 technical contributions, which stood at 14.7%.

Taken together, it is clear that the Sisvel pool offering covers a sizeable proportion of the stack numerically; that those rights correspond to crucial technical contributions made during standards-setting; and that this coverage has significantly strengthened with the arrival of Wi-Fi 7.

Sisvel licensors among top Wi-Fi patentees

The report is the latest confirmation of what we already knew: the Sisvel Wi-Fi Multimode pool provides access to some of the biggest individual Wi-Fi portfolios in the market.

Huawei is singled out for recognition as the largest patent owner spanning Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7, reflecting its widely acknowledged leadership rolein the standards-setting process. ZTE, Panasonic, Wilus and SK Telecom are also mentioned in the report as key players across both recent generations of the technology.

That said, the nature of standards means that Wi-Fi users need a licence to all essential patents, including those held by smaller players. As the report demonstrates, this can add up to dozens of individual deals. Pool benefits multiply when many portfolios, large and small, are combined under a single licence offer.

Tech-savvy implementers have taken pool licences

Some of the major implementers that have taken Wi-Fi licences from Sisvel appear on the list as patent owners in their own right.

Cisco – a top 10 patent holder in Wi-Fi 6, according to LexisNexis – took a Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 pool licence in 2025, prior to the launch of the Multimode programme. And Sony, which was announced as a Wi-Fi Multimode licensee at pool launch, is the eighth-largest patent holder with respect to Wi-Fi 7, according to the report.

So, what does this tell us? These companies are leading implementers, but they also own some of the largest portfolios in the space. This means that they have the technical expertise to assess the Sisvel pool portfolio, coupled with the commercial know-how to evaluate the offered royalty rate. The fact that they – along with licensor/licensees Huawei, ZTE, Panasonic and Philips – have chosen to take a pool licence (in each case without resort to litigation) speaks volumes.