Comcast's Legal Battle With Key ‘10G’ Tech Vendor Gets Even More Interesting

Comcast's complex legal battle with one of the technology vendors behind its current “10G” network upgrade has heated up, with California-based chipmaker MaxLinear countersuing the cable operator. MaxLinear claims in a December 1 New York federal court filing that Comcast stole trade secrets associated with Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0 technology. MaxLinear said in its suit that it “developed and shared” new technologies related to FDX DOCSIS 4.0 gateways “with the hope that Comcast would purchase and deploy them in service of the more than 14 million Comcast households that already use MaxLinear chips (and beyond). But Comcast had a different plan. While Comcast simultaneously lauded MaxLinear’s new technology as part of its future plans, Comcast scaled back its existing purchase orders of MaxLinear products and ultimately ceased the purchase of any new MaxLinear products altogether.” Untangling the key throughlines of this complex legal battle is challenging, but there seems to be a lot more to this case than a client taking a vendor's tech and then eighty-sixing the relationship.