Spherix Incorporated filed suit against Cisco and Verizon, accusing the companies’ routers and switches of infringing a group of patents related to virtual local area network (VLAN) tagging. Spherix alleges that the seven patents-in-suit are standard essential (5,959,990, 6,111,876, RE40999E1, RE44775E1, RE45065E1, RE45081E1, RE45095E1). Six of the patents originated with Nortel, the seventh with Bay Networks (which was acquired by Nortel in 1998).