Recently, Huawei announced its entry into the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 patent pool as a founding member, through which users can obtain licenses for Huawei's and other pooled patent owners' Wi-Fi 6 standard-essential patents. Meanwhile, Huawei's Wi-Fi 6 products are also licensed to the patent pool.

The license rates disclosed by Sisvel show that the compliance rate for enterprise access points (industrial enterprises) is $3 (about RMB 19.96), and the compliance rate for other products such as consumer electronics and smart home is $0.50 (about RMB 3.37). Some believe that this is a signal for Huawei’s start of licensing fees charging, as, in the future, users will have to pay a patent royalty of $0.5 per device to Huawei to obtain relevant patent license.

Patent pools are not new to the intellectual property industry--a kind of patent licensing trading platform that can eliminate the authorization barriers in patent implementation, which is conducive to the promotion and application of patented technologies. At the same time, the corresponding transaction costs incurred in patent licensing are greatly reduced, allowing the continual growth of patent pools and its increasing influence on the whole industry. Huawei’s participation into the Sisvel patent pool signifies that Huawei's Wi-Fi 6 related technology patents will circulate to a greater extent globally, which is undoubtedly of great importance to the company.

In addition, Huawei's founding membership in the Sisvel Patent Pool has enabled Huawei to participate in the design of the licensing framework and contribute many ideas to Sievel, the operator, to help make the pool more attractive by making licensing more convenient and technology sharing more effective, so as to further boost the development and industrialization of Wi-Fi 6 technology.

According to Huawei, the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 patent pool is currently composed of five rights holders. Compared to the Avanci patent pool, Sisvel patent pool is smaller on the scale of members and with fewer head companies, but it also has abundant experience in operating Wi-Fi technology. Sisvel is more familiar with the users of the technology and its trait of low market concentration, thus its previous experience in licensing efficiency improvement contributes to Huawei’s ultimate choice.

Huawei also expresses that it will consider various ways to operate its patents, including direct licensing and joining the patent pool, and it is open to considering cooperation with diverse patent pool operators subsequently.