User:Mark A Summerfield/sandbox

802.11 patent
In the early 1990’s, CSIRO radio astronomy scientists John O'Sullivan, Graham Daniels, Terence Percival, Diethelm Ostry and John Deane undertook research directed to finding a way to make wireless networks work as fast as wired networks within confined spaces such as office buildings. The technique they developed, involving a particular combination of forward error correction, frequency-domain interleaving, and Multi Carrier Modulation, became the subject of, which was granted on 23 January 1996.

In 1997 Macquarie University Professor David Skellern and his colleague Neil Weste established the company Radiata, Inc., which took a nonexclusive licence to the CSIRO patent for the purpose of developing commercially viable integrated circuit devices implementing the patented technology.

During this period, the IEEE 802.11 Working Group was developing the 802.11a wireless LAN standard. CSIRO did not participate directly in the standards process, however David Skellern was an active participant as Secretary of the Working Group, and representative of Radiata. In 1998 it became apparent that the CSIRO patent would be pertinent to the standard. In response to a request from Victor Hayes of Lucent Technologies, who was Chair of the 802.11 Working Group, CSIRO confirmed its commitment to make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

In 1999, Cisco Systems, Inc. and Broadcom Corporation each invested $4 million in Radiata, representing an 11% stake for each investor and valuing the company at around $36 million. In September 2000, Radiata demonstrated a chip complying with the recently-finalised IEEE 802.11a Wi-Fi standard, and capable of handling transmission rates of up to 54 Mb/s, at a major international exhibition.

In November 2000, Cisco acquired Radiata in exchange for $295 million in Cisco common stock with the intention of incorporating the Radiata Baseband Processor and Radio chips into its Aironet family of wireless LAN products. Cisco subsequently took a large write-down on the Radiata acquisition, following the 2001 telecoms crash, and in 2004 it shut down its internal development of wireless chipsets based on the Radiata technology in order to focus on software development and emerging new technologies.

Controversy over the CSIRO patent arose in 2006 after the organisation won an injunction against Buffalo Technology in an infringement suit filed in Federal Court in the Eastern District of Texas. The injunction was subsequently suspended on appeal, with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit finding that the judge in Texas should have allowed a trial to proceed on Buffalo’s challenge to the validity of the CSIRO patent. In 2007, CSIRO declined to provide an assurance to the IEEE that it would not sue companies which refused to take a license for use in 802.11n-compliant devices, while at the same time continuing to defend legal challenges to the validity of the patent brought by Intel, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Netgear.

In April 2009, Hewlett-Packard broke ranks with the rest of the industry becoming the first to reach a settlement of its dispute with CSIRO. This agreement was followed quickly by settlements with Microsoft, Fujitsu and Asus and then Dell, Intel, Nintendo, Toshiba, Netgear, Buffalo, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton, and 3Com.

The controversy grew after CSIRO sued U.S. carriers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in 2010, with the organisation being accused of being “Australia’s biggest patent troll”, a wrathful “patent bully”, and of imposing a “WiFi tax” on American innovation.

Further fuel was added to the controversy after a settlement with the carriers, worth around $229 million, was announced in March 2012. Encouraged in part by a somewhat jingoistic announcement by the Australian Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills Science and Research, Senator Chris Evans, an article in Ars Technica portrayed CSIRO as a shadowy organisation responsible for U.S. consumers being compelled to make “a multimillion dollar donation” on the basis of a questionable patent claiming “decades old” technology. The resulting debate became so heated that the author was compelled to follow-up with a defence of the original article. An alternative view was also published on The Register, challenging a number of the assertions made in the Ars Technica piece.

Total income to CSIRO from the patent is currently estimated at nearly $430 million. In May 2012, the CSIRO inventors were nominated by the European Patent Office (EPO) for a European Inventor Award (EIA), in the category of “Non-European Countries”.