Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable company, won $7.5 million in damages from wireless carrier Sprint Corp. for infringing telecommunications patents after a four-day federal jury trial. Comcast won a $7.5 million award against Sprint after a jury agreed that Sprint violated Comcast’s patents for VoIP and other telecommunications technologies. The trial and the ruling is likely going to be just one of many in a long, drawn-out legal battle between the one-time partners.

Namely, Comcast alleges that Sprint is violating patents it owns covering technologies like SMS/MMS, mobile broadband cards and hotspots, as well as certain traffic routing technologies (IP/MPLS).

  1. Communications System for Delivering Multimedia Internet Protocol Packets across Network Boundaries.Comcast claims that Sprint’s voice and data service using IP/MPLS backhaul or transport are infringing. Patent issued March 23, 2010.
  2. Transferring of a Message. Comcast claims that Sprint’s multimedia messaging service (MMS) products for picture mail, wireless video mail and mobile email infringe on this one. Patent issued April 26, 2005.
  3. Starting a Short Message Transmission in a Cellular Communication System.Comcast alleges that Sprint short message service (SMS) products such as Vision Pack, unlimited texting, wireless texting and wireless premium test messaging plans infringe.
  4. Mechanism for Dynamically Binding a Network Computer Client Device to an Approved Internet Service Provider.Comcast (via its TVWorks unit) claims that Sprint wireless data products, including mobile broadband USB models and PCMCIA wireless cards offered under the carrier’s 3G Mobile Broadband Connection and PowerVision plans infringe.

Sprint has had knowledge of the patented technology since at least November 2008, and Sprint’s infringement has been willful since that time, according to the Comcast complaint. Targeted in court papers were parts of Sprint functions such as Sprint Mobile Integration, which expands mobile-phone capabilities; the use of Google Voice for online voice mail; and Airave 2, which provides a boosted wireless signal.

On November 2, 2016 Sprint pushed for a Federal Circuit panel to nix a $7.5 million infringement jury verdict in favor of Comcast Wednesday, maintaining the lower court garbled the meaning of the three internet call routing patents involved.

Keywords: Patent, Patent infringement, technologies, telecommunication.