CSIRO gets one step closer to WLAN royalties

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 07:00

Opinion and Analysis

It said that these companies included Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Apple and NetGear and that it had offered licenses on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to these suppliers.

However there were reports in the US at the time that the CSIRO's proposed licence fee was anything but reasonable. US Wi-Fi Planet reported that "One former executive of a top-ranked computer maker alleges the [CSIRO] is asking a $US4 licensing fee for each chipset using [the CSIRO's patented] technology, amounting to up to 70 percent of a chipset's price."

The patent in question, US patent number 5,487,069 Wireless LAN was filed on November 23 1993 and issued on January 23 1996. It was assigned to the CSIRO by its five Australian inventors, named in the patent: John O'Sullivan, Graham Daniels, Terry Percival, Diethelm Ostry and John Deane.

The patent had it origins in research undertaken at Macquarie University with CSIRO funding which was subsequently commercialised by Radiata. That company was later sold to Cisco Systems which subsequently abandoned all work on WiFi chipsets.

The patent's role in 802.11a was closely examined, and its importance questioned, in a case study on Radiata prepared for the then Department of Education, Science and Training in November 2003.

Its authors noted that "Opinion differs on the ways in which the existence of CSIRO's wireless LAN patent influenced the subsequently agreed 802.11a standard. " They quoted a recollection by Radiata co-founder David Skellern on the evolution of the 802.11a standard, and say that, if his recollection is correct, "CSIRO's wireless LAN patent did influence the new standard, but in the diffuse and hard to trace manner that is a characteristic of public good research...It is worth noting that other well-informed individuals support the view that there is only an indirect connection between CSIRO's wireless LAN patent and the subsequent 802.11a standard."

They concluded that: "In this view, the patent is based on finding a non-trivial practical solution to wireless LANs based upon parameters set by the laws of physics over radio-wave propagation in this frequency range. Similarly, IEEE 802.11a is also based upon these immutable physical laws. Consequently, the design of IEEE 802.11a is likely to have ended up as it did without CSIRO's patent simply because this is a logical solution."