Who Is Leading the Cellular IoT Patent Race?

Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) have long played a central role in industries like mobile handsets and computing, where licensing frameworks are well-established, the value chain is relatively consolidated, and the value that standards bring to a device is more easily quantified. In contrast, SEP licensing for the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a far more complex and evolving challenge. A lack of clear valuation metrics complicates royalty assessments and Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) negotiations.

Moreover, the IoT ecosystem is extraordinarily diverse. It spans countless verticals and use cases from smart metering in utilities to asset tracking, livestock monitoring in agriculture, smart city applications, industrial automation, fleet management, or even environmental tracking. The range of applications is vast and fragmented, as illustrated in Table 1.

Table 1: Cellular IoT Use Cases

Use Case	Products integrating Cellular IoT standards
Smart Metering	Electricity meters, gas meters, water meters, heat meters
Asset Tracking	Shipping containers, pallets, trailers, high-value packages
Agricultural Monitoring	Soil sensors, weather stations, animal trackers
Smart Cities	Traffic lights, parking sensors, surveillance cameras, EV charging stations
Fleet Management	Delivery trucks, public transport buses, rental cars
Industrial Automation	Factory equipment, predictive maintenance sensors, robotics
Consumer Wearables	Smartwatches, fitness trackers, pet trackers
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X)	Connected cars, road infrastructure units, traffic management systems
Environmental Monitoring	Air quality monitors, pollution sensors, weather monitoring devices
Retail and Vending	Smart shelves, vending machines, interactive signage

Each vertical has its own technology stack, market structure, and end-user value proposition. This makes a one-size-fits-all SEP licensing approach nearly impossible.

SEP licensing in the IoT space is still in its early stages, with no universally accepted royalty benchmarks. As IoT adoption grows and connectivity becomes ubiquitous across industries, the need for scalable, fair, and sector-specific SEP licensing models will become more pressing.

Cellular IoT standards represent a subset of broader 4G and 5G technologies, developed by 3GPP to meet the diverse connectivity needs of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. These technologies include Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), LTE for Machines (LTE-M), LTE Category 1 (LTE-Cat 1), and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), each tailored for specific use cases:

• NB-IoT and LTE-M are optimized for low-power, low-bandwidth applications such as smart metering, asset tracking, and environmental sensors.
• LTE-Cat 1 supports higher data rates and enables real-time communication, making it ideal for payment terminals, point-of-sale systems, and interactive kiosks.
• V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) is designed for automotive applications. It enables vehicles to communicate with each other and with infrastructure for connected and autonomous driving.

As IoT adoption scales across industries, manufacturers, and service providers that build Cellular IoT-compliant products must be prepared to address royalty demands from SEP holders and patent pools. However, licensing Cellular IoT SEPs presents unique challenges. To negotiate effectively, both SEP owners and standards implementers must understand:

• Who holds SEPs for Cellular IoT standards?
• How many SEP holders are likely to request royalties?
• What percentage of all SEPs is covered by a patent pool program? Which SEP holders are part of the patent pool (pool insider), and which are not (pool outsider)?
• What is the aggregate royalty amount for all SEPs related to a particular Cellular IoT standard?

Figure 1: Unclear royalty requests from SEP licensors, both known and unknown, can complicate product development and commercial strategies.

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are not publicly available. While ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), the standards organization responsible for 4G/5G and Cellular IoT, maintains a patent declaration database, it lacks the transparency needed to identify which declared patents map to specific Cellular IoT standards. Most declarations refer to broad technical specifications without detailing the technical features or layers they relate to. This makes it difficult to assess whether a declared patent is related to NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, or V2X. In practice, this means that determining the relevance of a declared SEP requires in-depth analysis against technical specifications. This lack of clarity obscures the size and significance of declared patent portfolios and limits the ability of SEP licensors and licensees to evaluate market shares or royalty rates.

Some initiatives, like the Sisvel IoT patent pool and Avanci’s smart meter and EV charging programs, represent market solutions to bring structure and transparency to this space. However, such patent pools and platforms may not cover all Cellular IoT SEPs and may not license these SEPs for all use cases.

Cellular IoT SEP licensing is still in its early stages. Royalty rates, unlike in smartphones or traditional telecom, are far from standardized. The figure above highlights the informational gaps that both licensors and licensees face, which must be addressed to create a fair, predictable, and scalable SEP licensing environment for the IoT era.

To identify Cellular IoT patents, we began with worldwide patents declared to ETSI under the 4G and 5G technical standards. To determine which declared patents specifically relate to NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X, we used LexisNexis^® Classification, featuring an AI-powered algorithm developed to detect patents relevant to each Cellular IoT standard. The classifier was trained using a dataset of true positives (i.e., verified Cellular IoT SEPs) and true negatives (i.e., patents unrelated to IoT standards), enabling it to construct a relevant patent landscape. From this patent landscape, random samples were reviewed by subject matter experts to validate relevance to Cellular IoT or to flag misclassifications. Versions of the Cellular IoT patent landscapes were also shared with key patent holders who commented and provided feedback. These findings were then fed back into the model to improve its accuracy continuously in an iterative learning process. The final landscape represents a view of Cellular IoT-related patents, which subject matter experts and leading industry stakeholders have reviewed and validated to ensure reliability and coverage.

While this process successfully identifies patents related to Cellular IoT standards such as NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X, it is important to note that the resulting patent landscape comprises both Cellular IoT SEPs and non-SEPs. This is due to the limitations of the ETSI self-declaration database. ETSI does not assess whether the declared patents are truly essential to the standard. To ensure the accuracy and validation of the underlying ETSI declaration data,  LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions launched the Cellular Verified campaign. As part of this initiative, LexisNexis data teams cleaned and deduplicated ETSI declarations. They were then reviewed by more than 35 major ETSI declaring companies to ensure each patent owner’s internal records matched their declared 4G and 5G patents. This process ensures that the ETSI declaration data is now fully aligned with what these companies maintain in their internal records for 3G, 4G, and 5G. Learn more about our data cleaning and validation process here: https://www.lexisnexisip.com/cellular-verified/

17% of all ETSI-declared 4G and 5G patent families were identified as relevant to Cellular IoT technologies, representing a significant portion of the broader 4G and 5G patent landscape. Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of 4G/5G declared patents across Cellular IoT standards. LTE-M and NB-IoT show a balanced distribution, with a significant overlap of patent families declared under both 4G and 5G standards. In contrast, most LTE-Cat 1 patents are declared under 4G, while most V2X patents are declared under 5G.

Counting active pending or granted Cellular IoT-related patent families (INPADOC) by year of first publication (see Figure 3) reveals a steady increase in cumulative cellular IoT filings over the past decade from 2010 to Q2 2025. Patent activity for LTE-M, NB-IoT, and LTE-Cat 1 began around 2010, while V2X, a more recent technology, saw its first filings starting around 2018. All Cellular IoT patent filings exhibit a consistent upward trend over time, although LTE-Cat 1 has begun to plateau in recent years.

Understanding who owns which SEPs in a particular technology landscape is critical for both SEP holders and standards implementers. An SEP owner can effectively demonstrate the value of their portfolio when benchmarked against others, providing context on relative size, strength, and relevance. For companies implementing technologies subject to SEPs, knowing which entities own SEPs is equally important when approached by a patent owner or patent pool. This includes understanding the coverage of a specific SEP owner or patent pool compared to that technology’s total stack of SEPs. The complete picture of the Cellular IoT patent landscape, including the specific ownership distribution and clarity on which SEP holders license via pools or platforms, is indispensable for efficient licensing negotiations and determining FRAND licensing rates.

The LexisNexis Cellular IoT Report identifies the ranking of the top 30 ultimate commercial owners of Cellular IoT patents, according to their patent portfolio size, which includes the total number of patent families (INPADOC) for the various Cellular IoT standards: NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X. This separation is essential, as different product categories integrate different Cellular IoT standards depending on the product’s performance and connectivity requirements. The Ultimate Owner Ranking also indicates which of these top 30 SEP owners license their patents through the Sisvel IoT program, the Avanci EV charging program, or the Avanci smart meter program. Overall, the cellular IoT pool programs have gained substantial traction, sometimes covering up to 50% of the identified cellular IoT patent families.

The rankings show that Huawei and Qualcomm lead in NB-IoT and LTE-M, while LG Electronics and Huawei are the frontrunners in LTE-Cat 1 and V2X. Interestingly, several top-ranked companies have joined all three of Sisvel’s and Avanci’s different patent licensing programs. In contrast, some leaders have not joined any of these programs as licensors. This suggests that these companies continue to rely on in-house licensing teams and prefer bilateral negotiations rather than the security offered by a coalition. At the same time, other licensors appear more selective, participating only in select licensing programs or patent pools. These distinctions in licensing participation underscore the fragmented and evolving nature of SEP licensing in the Cellular IoT space.

Table 2: Extract from the top 30 Cellular IoT patent owners, ranked according to their patent portfolio size, counting the total number of patent families (INPADOC) for the different Cellular IoT standards: NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X.

Ultimate Owner	LTE-M Patent Families Rank	NB-IoT Patent Families Rank	LTE-Cat 1 Patent Families Rank	V2X Patent Families Rank
Huawei	1	1	2	2
LG Electronics	4	4	1	1
Qualcomm	2	2	5	3

Table 3: Extract from the top 30 Cellular IoT patent owners’ pool memberships

Ultimate Owner	Sisvel IoT Member	Avanci Smart Meter Member	Avanci EV Charging Member
Qualcomm	No	No	No
LG Electronics	Yes	Yes	Yes
Huawei	Yes	No	Yes

The full top 30 ranking can be accessed here: ‘LexisNexis Cellular IoT Report‘

We also find patent assertion entities (PAEs) among the top Cellular IoT SEP holders. These companies acquire SEPs primarily to monetize and assert them rather than to implement the underlying technologies. PAEs play an increasingly prominent role in the Cellular IoT landscape and often drive litigation in this space. One notable example is Shanghai Langbo, which reportedly sold its entire 5G patent portfolio to Apogee Networks earlier in 2025, a PAE managed and backed by Fortress Investment Group. Other prominent PAEs include:

• IP Bridge, which acquired SEPs from Panasonic and Huawei
• Sun Patent Trust, which manages and asserts SEPs on behalf of Panasonic
• Brevet Capital Management, operating under the names Unwired Planet and Optis Wireless, asserting SEPs originally held by Ericsson
• Pegasus Wireless, known for asserting SEPs acquired from KT Corp
• Key Patent Innovations, which now holds the BlackBerry SEP portfolio

Get access to the full ranking of Cellular IoT patent owners to benchmark your position

The growing presence of PAEs in Cellular IoT SEP ownership underscores the commercial and strategic value of these assets and introduces additional complexity for implementers navigating the licensing landscape. According to the recently published “US SEP Litigation Report 2025“, PAEs have emerged as the primary driver behind the doubling of US SEP litigation over the past decade. The data further suggests that the entry of PAEs into emerging SEP licensing markets, such as IoT, significantly increases the risk exposure for implementers operating in these spaces.

The value of patents, particularly those related to technical standards, can vary widely. While some SEPs may cover core technologies that span multiple generations of standards, others may protect only incremental enhancements to rarely implemented features. As a result, counting the number of patents in a portfolio may not provide an accurate picture of its overall value or enforceability.

The downloadable Ultimate Owner Ranking report also presents the top 30 ultimate owners of patent families related to NB-IoT, LTE-M, Cat 1, and V2X, ranked based on the LexisNexis^® Patent Asset Index of each portfolio. The Patent Asset Index is a quantitative measure of an entity’s innovative strength, whether for a single entity or across a broader technology field. It is calculated at the portfolio level and measures not just the number of patents a company holds but also how important and globally relevant those patents are. It allows for meaningful benchmarking of entities operating in the same technology field.

Table 4: Extract from the top 30 Cellular IoT patent owners ranked according to their patent portfolio Patent Asset Index in the different Cellular IoT standards: NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X.

Ultimate Owner	LTE-M Patent Asset Index Rank	NB-IoT Patent Asset Index Rank	LTE-Cat 1 Patent Asset Index Rank	V2X Patent Asset Index Rank
Qualcomm	1	1	1	1
LG Electronics	3	3	2	2
Huawei	4	2	4	3

The ranking underscores how relying solely on patent counts can change leadership in the Cellular IoT SEP arena. InterDigital, for example, ranks only 12th by number of Cellular IoT patent families, but rises to 5th when evaluated with the Patent Asset Index, a metric that captures portfolio quality and impact. Other companies known for successful SEP licensing also rank higher when assessed with the Patent Asset Index than when considering their portfolio size.

A closer look reveals that the portfolios with the highest average Patent Asset Index scores often belong to entities focused on R&D and patent commercialization. InterDigital, WILUS, Fraunhofer, and Ofinno concentrate on R&D, patent filing, and licensing. At the same time, Brevet Capital Management, Sun Patent Trust, and Ideahub have acquired patents from operating companies, typically after rigorous due diligence, to focus on asserting these patents.

When factoring in Patent Asset Index scores, the higher ranking of entities focused on R&D and patent commercialization underscores the importance of considering both patent quantity and quality when evaluating leadership in Cellular IoT SEPs.

Get access to the Cellular IoT report with a full ranking of patent owners to benchmark your position

There are two main approaches to determining FRAND licensing rates for SEPs. The top-down approach begins with estimating the total royalty burden for a standard, then allocating a share to each SEP holder based on their proportion of patents, ensuring proportionality. The comparable license approach, by contrast, benchmarks rates against existing agreements, adjusting for differences in portfolio size, patent quality, and scope. Courts and regulators often consider both methods, though limited transparency and inconsistent valuation practices continue to pose challenges.

Regardless of the method, objective, data-driven analysis is key. In top-down assessments, reliable data is needed to calculate the total SEP landscape and an individual patent owner’s or patent pool’s share. Access to SEP portfolio data is crucial for conducting comparable license assessments, ensuring that adjustments are made fairly to account for differences in the portfolio.

In recent years, courts have increasingly adopted data-supported evaluations; however, a significant barrier remains: the lack of comprehensive and reliable SEP data. While standards bodies like ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) maintain databases of declared patents (e.g., for 3G, 4G, and 5G), they do not assess the actual essentiality of these patents. Also, declarations are not specific enough to map declared patent families to the different Cellular IoT standards. Some patent pools publish curated SEP lists, but even these lack full coverage. As a result, most SEPs are not publicly listed, which complicates efforts to make fair, data-driven licensing decisions. This data gap makes it difficult for both SEP holders and standards implementers to determine what share of the SEP landscape a company or pool actually controls. The resulting uncertainty affects cost planning, negotiation leverage, and the ability to evaluate cumulative royalty demands, creating a fragmented and unpredictable licensing environment.

By relying on objective data using tools like LexisNexis^® IPlytics™, it is now possible to identify potentially essential patents for standards such as NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X, even when those patents are not officially declared or listed in patent pools. Expert validation, curated datasets, and iterative AI model training ensure the reliability of these models.

The patent data presented in this Cellular IoT report helps to uncover the often-hidden landscape of SEPs, enabling IP professionals to quantify both the numerator (patents owned) and the denominator (total patents for a standard) to assess ownership share fairly, as illustrated in the formula for calculating share of patent stack in Figure 4.

While SEP license agreements are generally global in scope, licensees often distribute products unevenly across countries. Therefore, geographic adjustments are typically necessary in SEP licensing to reflect the actual market coverage. A key consideration is whether the SEP owner holds a truly international portfolio or if most patents are filed in just one jurisdiction, often the home country. In such cases, the value and scope of the portfolio must be adjusted to reflect its limited territorial coverage.

Another critical factor is the legal status of the patents, including whether significant portions of the portfolio are nearing expiration. Additionally, understanding historical ownership, such as past reassignment activity and the corporate group structure, is essential to fully assess licensing rights. Both legal status and historic ownership are crucial when calculating past damages.

Analyzing a SEP portfolio’s jurisdictional coverage, legal status, and ownership history is only possible when working with a complete and reliable dataset of patents relevant to a given standard. This is why solutions like LexisNexis IPlytics are critical tools for supporting data-driven and transparent FRAND negotiations. By providing a clearer picture of SEP coverage, we support balanced, evidence-based negotiations and reduce the risk of litigation.