This week, Dominion Harbor Group, LLC announced that it will acquire a portfolio of patents from Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). This new partnership follows a spike in litigation campaigns initiated by NPEs managed by Dominion Harbor’s Monument Patent Holdings, LLC. As reported by RPX earlier this month, seven NPEs managed by Monument Patent Holdings filed nearly 50 patent infringement suits against operating companies in 2015—a marked increase compared to just nine cases lodged by two Monument entities (DataTech IP, LLC and Optical Tech IP) in 2014.

Optical Tech IP, LLC’s campaign continues with a new suit filed against Huawei. The campaign, began in early November of this year, asserts a single patent (7,747,172) and targets networking companies. The patent-in-suit relates to improving bandwidth efficacy using electrical signal processing, and it was previously owned by Eye Diagram IP, LLC. Optical Tech acquired the asserted patent in May 2014. Similar to the previous suits in the campaign, the complaint in this suit accuses Huawei’s optical networking components of infringing the patent-in-suit.

Optical Tech, LLC filed its inaugural round of infringement suits. The NPE sued Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, and Juniper Networks for alleged infringement of a patent related to a method for improving bandwidth efficacy in an optical signal using electrical signal processing (7,747,172). In three separate complaints, Optical Tech accuses defendants’ optical networks and components (including routers and switches) of infringing the ‘172 patent. This appears to be the first time the patent has been litigated.