In December 2023 it was announced that Huawei had succeeded in its patent lawsuit against AVM. The Munich Regional Court I ruled in favor of the Chinese company: Huawei wins against AVM in the Munich court – is there a risk of sales ban for Fritzbox? AVM actually uses a technology to which Huawei owns the patent rights, illegally for its current Fritzbox models and without paying license fees.
The judgment in which Huawei won against AVM concerns the so-called standard essential patent EP3337077. Huawei is one of the main contributors to a technology called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which is an important part of the fast Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax). Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) involves Wi-Fi base stations broadcasting to multiple client devices at the same time.
AVM announced an appeal against the verdict, which is not yet final.
Huawei wants 50 US cents per AVM device with Huawei's Wi-Fi 6 technology
It has now become known how much license fees Huawei wants from AVM per device: 0.50 US dollars, i.e. around 0.46 euros. AVM is supposed to pay this 50 US cents for each of its devices that uses Wi-Fi 6 technologies (IEEE 802.11ax), to which Huawei holds the patent rights. This Wi-Fi 6 rights package would include all of the Wi-Fi 6 patents that Huawei owns, not just the one in question that is currently being litigated in court.
The Berliners react with a software update
AVM has not yet given in to the dispute, of which little has been made public, and has instead released a firmware update for FritzOS on some of its devices that support Wi-Fi 6. In the changelog for this FritzOS 7.57 you can read under the “WLAN” section: “Change, adaptation of signaling fields for Wi-Fi 6”. Heise.de suspects that AVM is responding to Huawei's patent lawsuit with this update. However, technical details are unknown.
Huawei is suing AVM, Amazon, Netgear and Stellantis – that’s what it’s all about
