How Advanced Data on Standard Essential Patents Can Minimize Risk and Maximize Value

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Advanced data on standard essential patents can be a game-changer for standard essential patent (SEP) licensing strategies, helping organizations mitigate risk and secure more favorable outcomes in rate negotiations. In this article, we explain how Questel’s thoroughly vetted SEP database enables parties to search SEPs and verify essentiality to support rate negotiation strategies.

From Wi-Fi to cellular technology, standard essential patents provide the foundation for many of the products, services, and processes that we rely on every day. Licensing these patent-protected technologies is a necessary step for any player looking to enter these competitive fields. However, understanding which standard essential patent (SEP) rights need to be licensed and negotiating a ‘fair’ fee is not always straightforward.

As part of our October webinar ‘Advanced SEP Data to Support Your Negotiations Around Rate,’ Sanjay Nama, Director of Questel company Concur IP, discussed the major challenges facing SEP licensees and licensors and explained how his team developed Questel’s Standard Essential Patent Data & Analytics Database to provide both parties with the necessary data and essentiality information. Here, we summarize the key elements of his presentation.

What are the Main Data Challenges for Standard Essential Patents?

One of the key challenges facing the licensing market for standard essential patents is the over-declaration of patent families in fast-moving technology sectors, such as 4G and 5G mobile telecommunications. Difficulties arise whenever there is a surge in the number of declared families as it makes it challenging for both parties in the licensing negotiation to sift through the huge patent lists and attribute the correct value to SEPs.

Blanket declarations can be equally problematic in other technology sectors—such as Wi-Fi and audio-video codec—where declarations have been registered without any specific mention of the patents in question, making the process of identifying and analyzing standard essential patents less than straightforward.

At the same time, there is a huge inconsistency in royalty rates across the market, with some SEP owners—whether a company, non-practicing entity (NPE), or patent pool—charging a percentage of the product's selling price or a fixed price per unit and others demanding excessively high royalty rates.

An inability to check whether a standard essential patent is truly essential, or its royalty rate fair, can lead to a lack of trust between parties, which in turn can result in negotiation delays and the looming threat of injunction or costly litigation. Moreover, such disputes are now increasingly expanding to multiple jurisdictions, and the outcomes are hard to predict due to inconsistent court judgments across the jurisdictions and use of different frameworks for calculating royalty rates.

How Can Essential Patent Data Resolve These Challenges?

We developed our Standard Essential Patent Data & Analytics Database to help overcome these hurdles. Currently, it includes nearly 20,000 5G standard essential patent families and more than 15,000 4G SEP families that have each been manually reviewed by a team of telecommunications professionals. By creating the database internally, we also ensured the absence of bias required for it to serve as a neutral and trustworthy reference point for both licensors and licensees.

Our Standard Essential Patent Database

Manual review of 19,788 families for 5G; 15,256 for 4G.
No bias—the database was created independently.

Technologies covered include radio access network (RAN), core network, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), low-density parity-check (LDPC), turbo code, polar code, power control, resource scheduling, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ), software-defined networking and network functions virtualization (SDN/NFV), beamforming, and network slicing patents.

Standard essential patent database, image of 5G tower

Standard Essential Patents

: Our Expertise and Approach

The manual analysis for the new SEP Database was performed by the Concur IP team, a leading IP consulting company based in India that became part of the Questel group in early 2019. The team holds deep industry expertise and is renowned for its SEP-related capabilities, with its studies used to resolve many high-profile disputes across the world.

Our SEP Analysis Approach

Step 1: Assemble

Extraction of IPR declarations from the databases of standard-setting organizations (SSOs), including ETSI, IEEE, ITU, etc.
Standardization of patent numbers, standard numbers, patent assignees, etc.
Grouping of patent publications into families to prepare a patent census.
Random sampling of the patent census to obtain a sample representative of the whole patent census.

Step 2: Evaluate

Review of patent claims and segregation of UE and non-UE claims.
Evaluation of whether the patent is essential; review of all the declared and relevant standards.
Separate essentiality evaluations for UE and non-UE claims.
Record of evidence (sections and text) from the standard and provision of a reviewer comment to support the evaluation.

Step 3: Insights

Statistical analysis of the patent collection and results of essentiality evaluation.
Comparisons of the portfolios of different companies to assess relative strengths (essentiality rates, % share in the royalty stack).
Patenting trends and insights specific to each company.
Useful for economists/financial experts in royalty/damages calculation.

Accessing Questel’s New Standard Essential Patent Database

Users of our powerful patent search and analysis platform Orbit Intelligence (as well as the innovative SaaS-based platform Patently) can access our manually curated database of standard essential patents, including the ability to apply robust filters and combine new SEP fields with existing Orbit search fields effortlessly.

New standard essential patent fields have been added to advanced search

Screenshot of the new standard essential patent search field in Orbit Intelligence

Users can search and filter by technology, declaration date, standard number, claim type, and status

Screenshot of standard essential patent database search fields in Orbit Intelligence

Information is displayed in the standards tab

Screenshot of standard essential patent search results in Orbit Intelligence

As of February 2025, Orbit Intelligence will also include a new SEP 'Key Facts' dashboard to enable users to analyze a specific set of standard essential patents, including the ability to take a deep dive into declaration and essentiality data.

Screenshot of standard essential patent database dashboard in Orbit Intelligence

More technologies will be added to our Standard Essential Patent Data & Analytics Database, with Wi-Fi and audio-video codec SEPs to join our existing database of manually reviewed 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G standard essential patent families.

For a more detailed demonstration of our Database of Standard Essential Patents, watch our webinar ‘Advanced SEP Data to Support Your Negotiations Around Rate,’ which features demonstrations in Orbit Intelligence and Patently, or contact our Subject Matter Experts for specialist support.