An Expert Interview on Monetization, Market Dynamics, FRAND Licensing, and the Road from 5G-Advanced to 6G
Ingenious e-Brain: As the telecom industry moves toward transformative 6G technologies beyond 5G-Advanced, where do you see the most commercially valuable SEPs being formed – across AI-native networks, integrated sensing and communications, non-terrestrial access, edge intelligence, immersive experiences, energy-efficient infrastructure, and post-quantum security – and what critical differentiators should innovators consider when identifying technologies with lasting licensing potential versus those that may attract early technical attention but achieve only limited market adoption?
Gaurav Santhalia: I believe that the most valuable SEPs will be formed at the intersection of AI-native air interfaces, integrated sensing and communications, non-terrestrial networks, edge intelligence, immersive communications, energy efficiency, and post-quantum security. The key differentiators between technologies destined to drive lasting licensing revenues and those valued only by an early-adopter niche will be found in the technical essentiality and jurisdictional breadth of the patent families being built around them.
It is also important to note that the timelines are coming into greater focus – 3GPP has targeted December 2028 for Release 21 Stage-3 freeze and March 2029 for ASN.1/OpenAPI freeze. This means that there is a clear window of opportunity for innovators to align R&D, patent filings, standards activity, and commercialization strategies.
The potential for monetization through SEPs is significant, with Ericsson projecting 6.4 billion 5G subscriptions by 2031 and 180 million 6G subscriptions by the end of 2031, excluding the early adoption of AI-enabled IoT devices. This implies that the next cycle of SEPs will build its value proposition during the lifetime of the previous generation, enabling a period where high-quality patent portfolios may have licensing value across two technology waves.
Ingenious e-Brain: How have SEPs evolved from instruments of interoperability into strategic assets influencing market access, enterprise valuation, investment, and competitive positioning?
Gaurav Santhalia: A mature SEP portfolio serves many purposes: recurring licensing revenue, cross-licensing opportunities, freedom-to-operate protection, and technology leadership signaling. Its value is enhanced by the size of the addressable standards market: ITU counts 9.2 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions in 2025, of which mobile broadband makes up 89% and 5G comprises 36% of mobile broadband subscriptions.
GSMA estimates that mobile technologies and services will be worth $7.6 trillion in economic value in 2025-6.4% of global GDP and projects the contribution to reach $11.3 trillion by 2030. This explains the potential of a defensible royalty across a global device and service footprint to create significant long-term cash flow. However, the portfolio’s quality, breadth of coverage, claim validity, demonstrable essentiality, and importance to revenue-generating features are significantly more material than simply the number of declared SEPs.
Ingenious e-Brain: From a commercialization perspective, where does the present FRAND framework function effectively, and where is greater predictability required?
Gaurav Santhalia: FRAND will be at its most effective when there are ongoing exchanges of information between parties in a timely manner, in negotiations in good faith and with transparent logic to valuations. It becomes less predictable when there are divergent views on the relevant royalty base, portfolio strength, comparable licences, geographic scope, or how to address unwilling licensors and implementers. A commercially credible framework should therefore be based on comparable licence evidence, top-down portfolio analysis, and technical assessment rather than one particular formula. The WIPO report on the economics of FRAND licensing identifies comparable contracts, bottom-up analysis, and top-down analysis as principal valuation approaches. Used collectively, these approaches can narrow valuation ranges, enhance the accuracy of board-level forecasting, and reduce litigation-driven costs.
Ingenious e-Brain: What improvements in disclosure, essentiality analysis, and market intelligence would make SEP valuation and licensing more transparent without imposing disproportionate compliance costs?
Gaurav Santhalia: The market needs better data discipline rather than indiscriminate disclosure. Declarations should use normalized patent-family data, accurate ownership updates, clear standards mapping, and representative essentiality sampling by independent technical experts. This would improve due diligence for investors and licensees while limiting the cost of patent-by-patent review. Importantly, an ETSI declaration identifies a patent as essential or potentially essential; it is not itself an adjudication of validity or essentiality. ETSI’s public database nevertheless provides a vital starting point for portfolio landscaping and requires timely disclosure by members that become aware of potentially essential patents.
Ingenious e-Brain: As standardized connectivity expands into vehicles, industrial systems, healthcare equipment, and consumer IoT, how should SEP licensing models adapt to markets with different economics and supply chains?
Gaurav Santhalia: The nature of the licensing proposition must reflect the way that value is created in each vertical. Handsets, vehicles, factory controllers, medical devices – all have different replacement cycles, different margin profiles, different safety obligations, and different intensities of connectivity. The market needs segment-specific licences with predictable coverage, aggregate royalties, supply-chain efficiency, and terms appropriate to the standardized functionality deployed. The need is acute: ITU data show that more than 96% of the world’s population is covered by mobile broadband, although 2.2 billion people remained offline in 2025. The next stage of value creation will come not just from bringing more people online, but also from standardizing and licensing vastly more classes of devices and services.
Ingenious e-Brain: Under what conditions do patent pools and collective licensing platforms offer the most effective route to SEP monetization, and what safeguards are necessary?
Gaurav Santhalia: Pools are most effective when a product implements many patents owned by numerous licensors and bilateral transaction costs would otherwise be excessive. A well-designed pool can provide one-stop access, standardized agreements, lower administrative expense, broader compliance, and more predictable revenue distribution. However, it must maintain independent essentiality review, transparent participation rules, credible royalty allocation, access to patent lists, and competition-law safeguards. The commercial test is whether the platform reduces friction while preserving a reasonable aggregate royalty and meaningful choice. Scale intensifies the case for efficient collective mechanisms: GSMA has projected 5.5 billion 5G connections by 2030, while enterprise IoT connections were expected to more than double to 38.5 billion. As standardized connectivity spreads across billions of products, reducing per-licence transaction cost becomes a market requirement rather than an administrative convenience.
Ingenious e-Brain: How can smaller innovators, universities, and companies from emerging markets convert participation in standards development into sustainable commercial influence?
Gaurav Santhalia: They should participate selectively in working groups in which they have real technical differentiating capabilities, file patents prior to public disclosure, accumulate evidence linking claims to adopted specifications and seek partnerships to license and enforce. Market-power generating activities include quality and continuity of contribution and building coalitions rather than just showing up. 3GPP unites seven telecommunications standards development organizations, offering contributors a global-access pathway to a shared technical system. The prize is a growing market: GSMA forecasts unique mobile subscribers to total 6.5 billion by 2030. Small contributors can increase their return on investment by narrowing the focus of their efforts on a limited number of high-value features and viewing standards contribution, patent prosecution, product strategy, and licensing as a single, integrated process.
Ingenious e-Brain: How does divergence among national courts and regulators affect SEP valuation, licensing strategy, and investment decisions in global telecommunications markets?
Gaurav Santhalia: Fragmentation increases the cost of capital and complicates revenue forecasting because identical portfolios may face different rules on injunctions, global-rate setting, competition law, and negotiating conduct. Companies respond through forum selection, parallel proceedings, regional licensing structures, arbitration provisions, and larger litigation reserves. The result can be delayed market entry and higher transaction costs, especially for smaller firms. WIPO’s dedicated SEP case-law collection now contains 134 judgment texts across jurisdictions. That scale demonstrates that SEP risk is no longer concentrated in a handful of landmark cases; it has become a continuing global portfolio-management issue that must be reflected in valuation models, licence negotiations, and litigation reserves.
Ingenious e-Brain: What role will artificial intelligence play in SEP portfolio management, essentiality assessment, standards development, licensing and dispute resolution?
Gaurav Santhalia: AI can help considerably reduce the costs of landscaping, claim-chart generation, standards-to-patent mapping, prior-art screening, ownership normalization, and portfolio benchmarking. It may also help in identifying comparable licences and inconsistencies across large datasets. But legal and engineering expertise is needed to determine essentiality based on construction, specification interpretation, optional features, applicable jurisdictions, and patent validity. The business case is clear: monetizing AI applications is growing. GSMA reports 45% of operators see AI monetization as a priority. Networks are delivering: Ericsson reports commercial 5G standalone slicing offerings rose from 65 to 84 within six months. This suggests AI-powered network capabilities are graduating from experiments to differentiated paid services, where precise standards mapping and SEP valuation will become more important than ever. Governance policies must mandate audit-ready inputs, explainable models, confidentiality protocols, and human-in-the-loop controls before any licensing or litigation decisions are made.
Ingenious e-Brain: Looking five to ten years ahead, what strategic actions should SEP owners, implementers, investors, policymakers, and standards bodies take now to influence a healthier, more commercially viable market?
Gaurav Santhalia: SEP owners should focus on portfolio quality, evidence of essentiality, geographic relevance, and disciplined licensing operations. For implementers, it is about early standards intelligence and modeling the potential for royalties. Investors should focus on the difference between declared volumes and the true technically relevant assets. For policymakers and standards bodies, there is a need for greater transparency and resolution mechanisms without a dictated model for business practices. The short-term planning horizon is 3GPP Release 19, frozen in December 2025, with Release 20 still to come, and Release 21 now being used as the vehicle for the first 6G standards, with major freezing points through 2028 and well into 2029. Companies that align research and development, patent disclosures, standards contributions, product roadmaps, and licensing capabilities with the timelines of the relevant standards development organization will best position themselves for the next value-creation opportunity.
Closing Perspective
The future value of SEPs will be determined not by declaration volume alone, but by the disciplined alignment of technical contribution, patent quality, standards participation, licensing execution, and commercially adopted use cases.
