Fritzboxes: AVM reaches agreement in patent dispute with Huawei

AVM is not taking the patent dispute with Huawei to the next instance and the Federal Patent Court after all. Both companies have reached an out-of-court settlement – AVM has acquired a license for Huawei patents for Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7.

As a result, AVM will also be able to withdraw changes to FritzOS that the manufacturer introduced at the beginning of the year. AVM confirmed to heise online that this will happen with future firmware versions. The company made the changes at the turn of the year to circumvent a sales ban on current Fritzbox routers and Fritz repeaters. The sales ban imposed by Huawei is now also off the table following the agreement.

Both AVM and Huawei have withdrawn all mutual lawsuits. This means that AVM is no longer contesting the validity of Huawei's patents. "A good agreement has been reached," AVM told heise online – As usual, both companies are keeping quiet about the details.

Netgear is the last to resist

The Huawei v. AVM case (case number 6 U 4773/23 Kart.) was actually due to be heard at the Munich Higher Regional Court on April 17, 2024. The court date was canceled because both parties reached an agreement in advance.

Of the original three patent disputes with Amazon, AVM and Netgear, only Netgear is now continuing its fight against Huawei – before a Californian court, as the German courts would be guided by the previous rulings and outcomes with Amazon and AVM. This is reported by IP Fray, a website specializing in patent law.

Standard essential patent

The proceedings between AVM and Huawei most recently concerned the so-called standard-essential patent (SEP) EP3337077. It describes subtleties in the implementation of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) – a core function that has found its way into wireless networks with Wi-Fi 6 and is also included in Wi-Fi 7.

With OFDMA, WLAN bases can send data to multiple clients simultaneously, which in practice creates an attractive alternative to multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) introduced with Wi-Fi 5. Specifically, Huawei's patent refers to the Wi-Fi 6 signaling fields that indicate whether the data packet should go to one or more clients.

SEPs are patents that are fundamentally important for a technology, in this case, Wi-Fi. Huawei is one of the main contributors to the development of new wireless standards, with a corresponding patent portfolio.

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