A patent protection suit filed against Cisco this week could have big implications for vendors of WLAN gear and of the expected flurry of WiMAX fixed-wireless products.

Wi-LAN, of Calgary, Alberta, holds U.S. and Canadian patents on a radio modulation technique called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. This week the company filed suit in Canadian federal court, charging Cisco with infringing OFDM patents in the Aironet and Linksys brand 802.11a and 11g products Cisco sells in Canada. OFDM is the modulation technique used in all such products from any vendor.

The new suit comes just weeks after Wi-LAN settled a somewhat similar court case it had earlier brought against Redline, a maker of broadband wireless gear. Redline has agreed to pay a royalty on every OFDM-based product it sells, including future products based on the IEEE 802.16 standards, for fixed wireless nets. The royalty fees were not disclosed.

"The suit is important symbolically," says Steve Stroh, editor of the Focus on Broadband Wireless Internet Access newsletter, in Redmond, Wash. "Cisco's the biggest name in networking, and if Wi-LAN can, by some miracle, add Cisco's scalp to their belt, then lots of other people fall into line." Stroh notes that for now, this is a Canadian suit dealing with products sold Canada.

Through a spokeswoman, Cisco had a short statement: "Wi-LAN claims that its patents are related to industry standards and appears to be applying the patents to the Wi-Fi industry as a whole. We will respond as appropriate after reviewing the claims."

"This isn't a 'let's try to get away with extorting money' [strategy]," Stroh says. "Wi-LAN really does believe that it's only fair for the wireless industry to pay them for their OFDM patent (and the ‘licensed’ patents now) just like Qualcomm has done with CDMA [cellular technology]."

The Cisco suit is the opening gun of a more aggressive plan for patent protection, and license fee collection, by Wi-LAN because the company no longer has to shield and nurture the burgeoning WLAN industry, according to Wi-LAN executives.

In a statement on Wi-LAN's Web site, Syaed-Amr El-Hammamsy, Wi-LAN president and CEO, says that Redline was a "timely target" when the suit was filed in 2002 because it was using OFDM for wireless products that fell outside the IEEE 802.11 standards. "We did not want to impede the development of the 802.11a/g markets because they were in embryonic phase," he says. "Now that the market for Wi-Fi [the popular term for 802.11 WLANs] is growing… it no longer needs to be shielded or nurtured by Wi-LAN."