US 11402421

I'll research this patent number directly.

Let me try to retrieve the actual claim text.

Let me try to retrieve the claim language directly.

US 11,402,421 B2 — "Detecting Wireless Signal Leakage"

Source note: The bibliographic data below comes from the authoritative full text you supplied (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24) and is corroborated by the USPTO-hosted PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/61/20/f9/f0aa9d5e94d08e/US11402421.pdf. I did not find the issued patent in any CAFC 2026 docket, and I found no litigation or PTAB proceeding naming 11402421 — treat that as "not found," not as a confirmed negative.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (verbatim)

"Systems, apparatuses, and methods are described for operating and maintaining a data network, and for detecting problems such as signal leakage. In one implementation, a computing device may determine, based on availability and location, one or more mobile devices and may cause the mobile devices to detect a wireless signal. The detected wireless signal may be identified as having leaked from a network, such as a wired network, and used to detect the source of leaks."

Plain-language overview of the disclosed subject matter

The patent addresses FCC-mandated cable leakage detection. Rather than dispatching technicians with dedicated meters, a headend-side computing device (a "diagnostic server" working with the termination system 104) injects a diagnostic FM signal (e.g., 108–137 MHz, carrying a unique modulation frequency and/or pseudo-random code) into the HFC/coax plant. It then recruits subscribers' smartphones — which contain embedded FM tuners — to listen for the leaked signal. The server identifies candidate phones by GPS/location and subscription data, temporarily activates their FM tuners via a cellular/wireless activation signal, and receives reports back containing signal strength, direction, and location. Multiple phones' measurements are combined (e.g., via time-difference-of-arrival, TDOA). Users are prompted to move/rotate their devices to exploit linear and angular Doppler shift, and IMU/gyroscope/accelerometer/magnetometer data are used to correct the direction estimate. Incentives (e.g., "swing your device to skip an ad") encourage participation, and UIs guide users toward the suspected leak and let them photograph it.

Independent claims — important caveat

I was not able to retrieve the verbatim issued claim set of US 11,402,421 B2 itself, so I cannot state its independent claims with authority. What I did retrieve is the claim set of the continuation publication US 20220299556 A1 (21 claims, same title/specification, family member of US 11726127 B2). Those claims may differ from the issued '421 claims, and the plain-language paraphrases below should be treated as describing the family's claim scope, not verified quotations from the 11402421 patent.

Claim 1 (apparatus) — independent. A device with processor and memory that: determines a portion of a wired network to test; determines one or more mobile devices registered to receive data service at a premises within a threshold distance of that network portion; causes those mobile devices to monitor for a wireless diagnostic signal; causes the wired network to emit that signal; and receives back information indicating whether the signal was detected. The key hook is the "registered to receive data service at a premises" selection criterion.

Claim 8 (non-transitory computer-readable medium) — independent. The same process expressed as stored instructions: cause mobile devices to monitor for a wireless diagnostic signal, cause the wired network to emit it, and receive detection information back.

Claim 15 (system) — independent. A computing device configured to perform the same determine/monitor/emit/receive sequence in system form. (The retrieved text elides the full body of claim 15 and its dependents 16–21, so I cannot characterize their added limitations.)

Notable dependent-claim themes (from that publication's set): receiving "testing availability" information and downloading a list of network portions to be tested (claim 2); updating a leakage status using GPS coordinates (claim 3); determining a test time (claim 4); selecting mobile devices by address, including neighbors of the address (claims 5, 6, 13); and — most relevant to the Doppler disclosure — instructing a mobile device to rotate while measuring and determining a leak point from the measurements plus the rotation parameters (claim 7).

Uncertainty flags

1. Claim set: The independent-claim descriptions above derive from US 20220299556 A1 (the continuation), not from the granted 11402421 text. If you need the exact '421 claims, pull the granted patent's claims section from USPTO PatentCenter or the PDF — I do not have that text in hand and will not reconstruct it from memory.
2. Continuation priority: Google Patents lists "Priority to US17/835,529" dated 2022-06-08, i.e., the '421 is the parent of US 11726127 B2 rather than the child.
3. No CAFC 2026 docket activity involving 11402421 surfaced in my searches; absence of evidence here is not proof of absence.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 11402421. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me search more specific litigation databases.

Let me run a few more targeted searches to confirm.

Summary: No litigation found involving US 11,402,421

I searched for litigation specifically involving US Patent No. 11,402,421 ("Detecting wireless signal leakage"). I found no known litigation — no district court complaints, no ITC investigations, no PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR), and no CAFC appeals — in which US 11,402,421 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue.

What the patent is (context relevant to why)

• Patent: US 11,402,421 B2 — "Detecting wireless signal leakage"
• Application: US 16/674,370; filed 2019‑11‑05; granted 2022‑08‑02
• Assignee: Comcast Cable Communications, LLC (original and current assignee; assignment recorded REEL/FRAME 050919/0526)
• Inventors: Larry Wolcott, John Heslip, Michael O'Dell, Thomas Bach
• Family: Continuation US 17/835,529 → US 11,726,127 B2 (also titled "Detecting wireless signal leakage"). A separate later Comcast application (US 17/221,409 → US 11,758,362 B2, "Methods and systems for determining signal leaks in a network") cites this family.

This is a Comcast-owned, operating-company patent covering cable/HFC network signal-leak detection using consumer FM tuners and mobile devices. Because it is held by an operating company rather than an NPE/assertion entity, it is not the type of patent that typically appears in publicly reported patent litigation. The Google Patents page for US 11,402,421 lists no "Litigation" or "Related litigation" entries — a further indication that no cases are indexed for this specific patent. (Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402421/en)

Searches performed and results

I checked for the patent number against litigation-oriented sources and general web results, including the Unified Patents litigation portal, RPX Insight, Docket Alarm, and CAFC/PACER-derived documents. Results returned:

• The patent's own Google Patents / Wikidata / patent-review pages — no litigation links.
• Unrelated matters involving similarly numbered but different patents (e.g., a '024 patent in Merck v. Wyeth re pneumococcal vaccines; an E.D. Tex. case number "2:17‑cv‑00502"; a UK company no. 11402421). Per your instruction, I did not treat these as results for US 11,402,421.
• Numerous Comcast-as-defendant patent suits (e.g., Entropic Communications, Touchstream, Promptu, Fleet Connect, Rovi/Veveo, SIPCO), none of which asserted US 11,402,421.

Case table

Important caveats

• Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. My conclusion is based on searches that did not surface any assertion of this specific patent. I could not complete a full, exhaustive PACER docket sweep, so a sealed, very recent, or poorly indexed filing cannot be entirely excluded.
• I am not asserting that US 11,402,421 has never been litigated; I am reporting that no litigation is known or discoverable for it from the sources searched.
• Note the distinction (relevant to your work): the Comcast patent family and Comcast as a party appear frequently in other litigations (both as plaintiff and defendant), but those cases involve different patent numbers. Nothing I found ties US 11,402,421 itself to any of them.

If you need a definitive docket-level confirmation, the next steps would be: (1) a PACER/RPX "patent at issue" search keyed to the exact number 11,402,421 (not the family), and (2) an assignment/ownership history check in case rights were transferred before any assertion.

I'll verify the ODP default against live sources before writing up.

Let me run a second round of targeted checks against PTAB-specific dockets and the family members.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 11,402,421: 0. The structured USPTO ODP block in this prompt returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent, and my independent web checks surfaced none either — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM, no derivation, and no Federal Circuit appeal flowing from a PTAB decision on this patent. Because the count is zero, there is no breakdown by status (active / invalidated / sustained / settled / institution-denied) to report, and no claim-level FWD outcomes exist to cite.

Bottom line for a defendant: this is neither a "survived two IPRs and is hardened" patent nor a "claims 1–5 are canceled" patent. It is an unchallenged patent. That cuts in your favor procedurally — there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel on anyone, no General Plastic "second-bite" exposure, no PTAB claim construction or FWD to work around — and it means the entire invalidity case is still unbuilt. It cuts against you in that you get no free credibility findings: you would be the first petitioner, which is the most expensive and highest-uncertainty posture in an AIA trial. Practically, the absence of any PTAB activity is consistent with the litigation picture in the earlier section (no assertion found against anyone), because the § 315(b) one-year clock never starts without service of a complaint.

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Proceedings on file

There are no proceedings to report. I will not manufacture sections for proceedings that do not exist. For a defendant's benefit, the following near-misses were surfaced and are not this patent:

• "The '421 patent" appearing in a PTAB petition PDF (a DSSS/spread-spectrum patent with five decades-old secrecy orders, discussed in CBT Flint Partners v. Return Path line of authority). This is a different patent that happens to end in "421." Per the operating rule to interpret identifiers literally rather than auto-correcting, I flag it and exclude it.
• IPR2025-00632 — Revvo Technologies v. Cerebrum Sensor Technologies (US 11,835,421 B2) — same trailing digits, entirely unrelated subject matter.
• Comcast's own PTAB campaign as petitioner (IPR2024-00438 and companions against Entropic's US 11,399,206; IPR2025-00180/00181/00182 against US 11,785,275; IPR2017-00217 et al. against Rovi; IPR2018-00342 against Promptu; IPR2019-00237 against Veveo). Comcast is a frequent and aggressive IPR petitioner, but in every one of those it is the party attacking someone else's patent — none concerns US 11,402,421.
• Comcast patents in the same leak-detection technology space: US 9,444,719 B2 ("Remote detection and measurement of data signal leakage," Wolcott et al.) and US 11,758,362 B2 ("Methods and systems for determining signal leaks in a network"). Caveat: I did not verify whether either has been the subject of an AIA trial, and I am not representing that they have. If your adversary's portfolio interests you, these are the more likely PTAB targets than the '421, because the '362 has already been cited in third-party citation records.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: 100% UNTESTED. No claim of US 11,402,421 has been canceled, confirmed, or even construed by the Board, because no petition has ever been instituted. The patent issued 2022-08-02 from an application filed 2019-11-05, so it is an AIA-era patent — IPR remains fully available, but the PGR window closed nine months after grant (2023-05-02) and is no longer an option. Note the inherited caveat from the earlier patent-summary section: the independent-claim characterizations in this file derive from the continuation publication US 20220299556 A1, not from a verified verbatim copy of the '421 claim set. Do not build an invalidity theory off those paraphrases — and note that if the '421 is indeed the parent of US 11,726,127 B2, then the continuation's claims were drafted to a different scope, which means the '421 and '127 claim sets may rise and fall on different art.

Estoppel landscape: clean, in both directions. Under § 315(e)(2), estoppel only attaches to a petitioner that obtains an FWD. With zero FWDs on this patent, no prior-art ground is estopped against anyone, and there is no privity chain to worry about. Symmetrically, if your client files, you are not precluded by any prior petitioner's conduct, and there is no Advanced Bionics / § 325(d) risk of "same art already before the Office" beyond ordinary prosecution-history exposure — the examiner's record, not a Board record, is your only § 325(d) concern. Likewise, because no parallel litigation is known (per the litigation section), there is no Fintiv / § 314(a) discretionary-denial overlay and no Sotera stipulation to negotiate. You'd be filing onto a blank slate.

Pattern signals: none on this patent. No repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (I found no Unified Patents involvement), no patent-owner appeal activity tied to this number, and no Director Review. The Comcast litigation and PTAB volume one sees in search results is real but is other patents and, frequently, Comcast as the challenger rather than the owner — which is exactly the profile of an operating-company patent that hasn't drawn attack. I could not complete an exhaustive PACER/ODP sweep; treat the zero as "none known or discoverable," not as a certified negative.

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Recommended next steps

1. Do not cite a PTAB outcome in any demand-letter response or IPR decision memo for this patent — there isn't one. If opposing counsel asserts that this patent has been "upheld by the PTAB," that is inaccurate; it has never been before the PTAB.
2. Confirm the negative at docket level before relying on it. Query the USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) and the ODP API keyed to the exact string 11,402,421 (not the 11402421-family and not the '127 continuation), and cross-check Docket Alarm / RPX "patent at issue" for the same number.
3. If you are a defendant facing assertion, note the statutory posture before drafting a petition: PGR is time-barred (window closed 2023-05-02); IPR under § 311–319 is the vehicle; the § 315(b) one-year clock is measured from service of a complaint, so diarize the service date immediately. With no parallel PTAB proceeding, there is no joinder target under § 315(c) and no possibility of riding another petitioner's institution decision.
4. Ground the challenge on the prosecution record, not on this file. Because the earlier section flagged that the issued '421 claim text was never retrieved verbatim, pull the granted claims from USPTO PatentCenter or the PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/61/20/f9/f0aa9d5e94d08e/US11402421.pdf before charting art onto them.
5. Re-check quarterly. A patent this recent (granted 2022-08-02) and this commercially relevant to FCC Part 76 leakage compliance is a plausible future IPR target; a first petition could appear at any time and would instantly change the estoppel and cost calculus for every downstream defendant.

Sources consulted: USPTO ODP "PTAB proceedings on file" block (canonical, supplied in prompt); USPTO PTAB E2E petition documents indexed at ptacts.uspto.gov; Google Patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402421/en; Docket Alarm PTAB dockets (IPR2025-00180, IPR2025-00183, IPR2025-01209); Federal Circuit/CourtListener appellate materials. I found no FWD, institution decision, termination, or appeal touching US 11,402,421, and I have not cited one.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent.

Let me try more targeted assignment-record searches.

I have the key reel/frame. Let me verify the correspondent and check for any other recorded assignments.

Inventors

Four inventors are named on US 11,402,421 B2. All four executed an assignment of their rights to the assignee the day before the application was filed (effective 2019‑11‑04, per the record at REEL/FRAME 050919/0526), which is the ordinary signature for a corporate-originated filing.

Unusual-pattern check: none of the classic pre-fire-sale tells appear. The only recorded conveyance from these inventors is the original assignment to Comcast; there is no inventor→third-party assignment, no confirmatory assignment, and no inventor quitclaim recorded. Inventor execution (2019‑11‑04) precedes filing (2019‑11‑05) by one day, so all four were still with Comcast at filing. Wolcott and Bach are prolific, long-tenured Comcast named inventors on adjacent cable-diagnostics patents (US 9,380,475 "Network implementation of spectrum analysis"; US 9,444,719 "Remote detection and measurement of data signal leakage"), which is consistent with an in-house R&D team rather than a patent-brokerage front.

(Caveat: the assignor addresses for Heslip and O'Dell were not retrievable in this pass; the "employer at filing" call for them rests on the face of reel 050919/0526 — all assignors conveyed to Comcast — not on an independently verified employment record.)

Original assignee

Comcast Cable Communications, LLC — named as assignee on the issued patent's face and as the sole assignee of record at REEL/FRAME 050919/0526.

• Entity type / status (background, not independently re-verified via SEC in this pass): a Pennsylvania LLC and the principal operating subsidiary through which Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA) holds its cable/ISP operations. Comcast Corporation is a going concern; there is no bankruptcy, dissolution, or receivership involving this assignee that I found.
• Primary line of business: operation of the HFC/DOCSIS cable distribution plant and provision of broadband, video, and voice services — i.e., precisely the "wired network" the patent's claims diagnose. The patent is largely about an operator's own network-maintenance workflow (FCC-mandated cable leakage detection), which is why the assertion profile looks the way it does.
• Product embodying the claims: the claims are directed to network-side detection/location of RF leakage from the operator's own wired plant using subscriber mobile devices as sensors. That is a service/process the assignee operates internally rather than a discrete SKU. I could not confirm from the sources retrieved that Comcast has deployed this specific implementation commercially; treat "ships a product embodying the claims" as unverified for this patent specifically, while the assignee is unambiguously an operating company.
• Recorded reassignment activity since grant: none. The only Google Patents legal-event entries after grant are a certificate of correction ("CC") plus routine fee/entity-status entries — none of which is an ownership change.

Family context (these are separate applications, not links in this patent's chain, and each has its own assignment record): continuation US 17/835,529 → US 11,726,127 B2 (filed 2022‑06‑08, same title) and US 17/221,409 → US 11,758,362 B2 ("Methods and systems for determining signal leaks in a network"). Both remained Comcast-controlled per the citations/assignee data visible on their Google Patents pages.

Assignment timeline

One recorded assignment; no post-issuance transfers.

• 2019‑11‑04 (executed) / recorded 2019‑11‑05 — Reel 050919/0526
  • Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST" (per the record's free-form text: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST; ASSIGNORS:WOLCOTT, LARRY; HESLIP, JOHN; O'DELL, MICHAEL; AND OTHERS; effective date 2019‑11‑04)
  • Assignors: Larry Wolcott; John Heslip; Michael O'Dell; Thomas Bach (the "AND OTHERS" elision covers Bach)
  • Assignee: Comcast Cable Communications, LLC, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
  • Correspondent of record: Not retrieved. The assignment record's correspondent field did not surface in any source I could reach in this pass, and I will not reconstruct it from memory. For completeness, the prosecution-side attorney/agent of record on closely related Comcast applications is Banner & Witcoff, Ltd. (Washington, DC) (e.g., attorney/agent listing on US 2017/0055167; Banner & Witcoff also served as Comcast's IPR counsel, e.g., IPR2017‑01048) — but that is a lead, not a verified correspondent-of-record for reel 050919/0526. With only one link in the chain, recurrence of a correspondent is not assessable regardless.
  • Context: Ordinary at-filing corporate assignment — the four inventors conveyed to their employer one day before the 2019‑11‑05 filing. Not a fire-sale, reorg, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No other conveyances. No security agreement, no merger, no change of name, no release, no correction, and no transfer to any third party appears for US 11,402,421 across the sources searched. The patent has been held by the original assignee continuously since 2019‑11‑04.

Verification link: USPTO Patent Assignment Search — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (legacy interface at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Search by patent number 11402421 or by application 16/674,370; the single hit should be reel/frame 050919/0526. Filing-date/ownership cross-checks: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402421/en (Legal Events) and https://patents.google.com/patent/US20210132133A1/en.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11402421
    2019 : Inventors assign rights to Comcast
         : Application filed 05 Nov
    2022 : Patent granted
         : Certificate of correction issued

Note on the diagram: the assignment executed 2019‑11‑04 and was recorded 2019‑11‑05, both within the 2019 band, so those two events are stacked under the 2019 label. There is no later ownership event to plot; the 2022 grant and certificate of correction are included only to show the chain has remained static since filing.

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — under the rubric this is the correct call because the only record is the original assignment: a single conveyance (inventors → Comcast Cable Communications, LLC) at REEL/FRAME 050919/0526, executed 2019‑11‑04, recorded 2019‑11‑05, with no subsequent recorded transfer, no security interest, no change of name, and no release.

Justifying in practical terms: zero of the eight NPE/troll signals are present, and every affirmative datapoint — an operating-company assignee that operates the very HFC plant the claims diagnose, four long-tenured in-house inventors (Wolcott and Bach recur across Comcast's cable-diagnostics portfolio), and no assignment activity whatsoever in the seven years since filing — points to operating-company retention of a non-asserted patent, not to any NPE chain. The "insufficient data" label reflects the literal rubric condition ("no records, or only the original assignment"), not genuine ambiguity about who owns the patent: Comcast does.

Open items for definitive confirmation (I could not complete these in this pass, and I have not filled the gaps by inference):

1. Pull the correspondent of record for reel 050919/0526 from USPTO Assignment Center directly — I did not retrieve it.
2. Confirm the current assignee of record and the absence of any post-2022 conveyance via the Assignment Center's patent-number search (11402421) and application search (16/674,370); note that an unrecorded or non-indexed transfer cannot be excluded by search alone.
3. If ownership diligence matters, check the parallel assignment records for the family members US 17/835,529 (US 11,726,127 B2) and US 17/221,409 (US 11,758,362 B2) — same assignee expected, but I did not verify their reel/frame data.

No assignment has been fabricated here. Where the record was unavailable (correspondent name, assignor addresses for Heslip and O'Dell), it is marked "not retrieved" rather than reconstructed.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 11,402,421 specifically. Let me run targeted searches.

Let me try to retrieve the front-page references directly.

I found a source listing the front-page references. Let me get the complete citation list and details.

I hit the tool-step limit before I could pull the full text of each individual reference, so I'll give you what I was able to retrieve and be explicit about what remains unverified. Read the caveat block at the end before relying on any § 102 mapping.

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Prior art cited on the face of US 11,402,421 B2

1. What I searched and what verified ID I used

I searched for the identifier 11402421 literally, restricted to this patent. Two independent databases returned the same document:

• Google Patents — US11402421B2, "Detecting wireless signal leakage," App. 16/674,370, filed 2019‑11‑05, granted 2022‑08‑02, Comcast Cable Communications LLC (source already supplied in your full text).
• Justia Patents — patent/11402421, which reproduces the USPTO front page: assignee Comcast (Philadelphia, PA), inventors Larry Wolcott, John Heslip, Michael O'Dell, Thomas Bach; Primary Examiner Jermele M. Hollington; Assistant Examiner Temilade S Rhodes-Vivour; Application 16/674,370; Class 455/501 (Noise, Distortion, or Singing Reduction). (Source: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11402421)

Critically for your task: the Justia record exposes the "Referenced Cited" list — i.e., the applicant/examiner‑cited prior art — which the Google Patents text you supplied does not include. That list is reproduced below.

⚠️ Provenance caveat on the reference list. The Justia extract I retrieved was truncated mid‑table (the row after Barrentine rendered as "20170133982 | December 2017 | KR," which is malformed — a US number with a foreign authority code). I am therefore reporting the list as retrieved, flagging the ambiguous row rather than normalizing it, per your instruction not to auto‑correct identifiers.

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2. Front-page references as retrieved

U.S. patent documents (title omitted where not retrievable):

Foreign patent documents:

Additional citations appearing on the family member's Google Patents page (publication US 20220299556 A1, the continuation in this family — the same reference set is carried across the family):

⚠️ Internal inconsistency to resolve. Google Patents shows "Citations (6)" for the family member, whereas the Justia front page lists 9 U.S. patent documents + 2 WO publications. These counts cannot both be the complete set for the same document. Likely explanations: (a) Google Patents and Justia are reflecting different family members' citation tables; (b) some references are examiner‑cited vs. applicant‑cited and are segregated differently; or (c) the Justia table includes citations that Google Patents classifies under a different heading. This is an unresolvable discrepancy with the data in hand and should be reconciled against USPTO PatentCenter (the "References Cited" / PTO‑892 and examiner's search notes) before being treated as the definitive set.

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3. Per‑reference analysis

I need to be blunt about a limitation: within my search budget I retrieved the bibliographic metadata for these references but not the full text of each individual reference, and none of these fifteen documents is one I can describe from reliable recall. Rather than invent technical descriptions — which would produce a fabricated § 102 analysis — I've stated for each what is verified, what is inferable only weakly, and what must be checked in the reference itself.

3.1 References with a defensible field inference

US 2013/0291044 A1 (Zinevich) and US 2015/0181442 A1 (Zinevich) — Oct. 31, 2013 and Jun. 25, 2015.
Zinevich/Zinovich is an established inventor name in the cable‑TV/HFC signal‑leakage detection field — corroborated within your own supplied documents, where the Wolcott patent US 9,444,719 B2 ("Remote detection and measurement of data signal leakage," also Comcast) cites US 8,458,759 B2 to Zinovich in its front‑page reference list. The two Zinevich publications here are therefore the most field‑proximate references in the set and the most likely § 102 candidates.
Potential § 102 exposure: to the extent either discloses injecting a test signal into a wired/HFC plant and wirelessly detecting the leakage, it would bear on the general leakage‑detection concepts in the '421 independent claims (the "cause the wired network to emit a diagnostic signal" and "receive information indicating detection" steps). It would not appear to reach the '421's distinguishing element — recruiting subscriber mobile devices identified as registered to receive data service at a premises within a threshold distance, with conditional activation of embedded FM tuners. Content unverified; confirm before citing.

US 2012/0100847 A1 (AT&T, "Performance diagnosis of wireless equipment and a wireless network over out‑of‑band communication") — published 2012‑04‑26.
This is a strong candidate on the diagnostic architecture axis: it concerns diagnosing wireless equipment/network performance using an out‑of‑band channel. The '421's independent claims are built around a computing device commanding remote devices over a wireless/cellular channel to collect diagnostic measurements.
Potential § 102 exposure: possibly relevant to dependent claims reciting the computing device's remote‑control/diagnostic‑messaging architecture; unlikely to anticipate the independent claims because it is premised on 2‑way network performance diagnosis, not leakage of an injected FM signal from coax shielding. Title‑level relevance only; content unverified.

US 2013/0324147 A1 (Comcast, "Access Node Locations in a Network") and US 2014/0036975 A1 (Comcast, "System and method for analyzing a network") — 2013‑12‑05 and 2014‑02‑06.
Same assignee as the '421, both about network analysis/topology. These are the type of reference that maps to the '421 dependent themes already noted in your prior summary — determining areas to test based on wired‑network topology and node locations, and updating a leakage status by zone.
Potential § 102 exposure: dependent claims concerning topology‑based area selection and network‑analysis reporting. Not the independent claims. Content unverified.

3.2 References for which I can state only the risk profile

For the following I have no reliable technical description and will not manufacture one. Each is listed with the claim families it would need to be checked against:

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4. Bottom‑line § 102 assessment

Based on the reference set as retrieved and the family claim scope described in your earlier sections:

1. No cited reference appears capable of anticipating the independent claims. The independent claims require the conjunction of: (i) a computing device determining a portion of a wired network to test; (ii) selecting mobile devices registered to receive data service at a premises within a threshold distance; (iii) remote activation/monitoring control of those devices; (iv) causing the wired network to emit a diagnostic signal; and (v) receiving back detection information. None of the retrieved references is described in a way that suggests this combination. The references that are field‑proximate (Zinevich) reach only the generic "inject a signal and find the leak" concept; the references that are architecture‑proximate (AT&T out‑of‑band diagnosis) reach only the remote‑diagnosis concept.

2. The realistic § 102 risk is confined to dependent claims — specifically (a) area/zone selection and reporting against a leak‑measurement database (cf. the Comcast network‑analysis references), and (b) generic FM/RF leakage detection (cf. the Zinevich references). The Doppler/rotation‑based direction‑finding dependents appear to have no anticipation risk from anything in this list.

3. The strongest art in this set is arguably the applicant's own prior work — note that your supplied text shows the same lead inventor (Wolcott) on Comcast's US 9,444,719 B2, "Remote detection and measurement of data signal leakage." That is a § 102(b)/§ 103 candidate in its own right if it predates 2019‑11‑05 (it does: granted 2016‑09‑13), and it is a more credible obviousness reference than several entries above. It does not appear in the front‑page citation list I retrieved, which is itself worth checking — a failure to cite the same inventor's own earlier leakage patent would be a notable prosecution gap.

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5. Confidence and required next steps

Confidence levels:

• High: the identity of US 11,402,421, its bibliographic data, and that Justia lists the reference set reproduced in § 2.
• Medium: the Zinevich and AT&T field inferences (reasonable, but content not verified).
• Low / none: the technical content of the remaining references. I have not verified any of them and I am not asserting what they disclose.

Do not treat any § 102 mapping in § 3 as an anticipation opinion. To convert this into a defensible invalidity analysis you need three things I could not obtain within the tool budget:

1. The verbatim issued claims of US 11,402,421 (your prior sections already flag that these were never retrieved — that gap still stands and it is the single biggest hole in any § 102 mapping).
2. Full text of each cited reference, from USPTO PatentCenter / Google Patents individual pages, verified for disclosure of injecting a diagnostic signal into a wired network and detecting its egress with a subscriber mobile device.
3. A reconciliation of the citation-count discrepancy (Justia's 11–12 entries vs. Google Patents' "Citations (6)") against the PTO‑892 in the file wrapper.

If you can authorize a larger retrieval budget, I'd pull the granted claims first, then the Zinevich and AT&T references' full texts, then the two WO documents and the malformed "20170133982 / KR" row.

I'll research the prior art landscape before building the obviousness analysis. Since no Prior Art section was actually included in the provided text (the supplied full text is truncated mid-description and does not include the "References Cited" or claim set), I need to establish both the claim scope and the candidate references.

I now have the actual granted claim text. Let me retrieve the complete claim set and probe for additional prior art in the mobile-device/crowdsourcing and remote-tuner-activation space.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,402,421 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Preliminary note on inputs (read first)

Two things need to be flagged before the analysis proper.

(a) There is no "Prior Art section" in the material supplied. The instruction says to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page," but the page text I was given contains no citable prior-art reference list. The only prior-art-adjacent content is the Google Patents keyword field: "mobile devices, signal, mobile device, mobile, wired network." The supplied full text is also truncated mid-description (it ends in the middle of the sentence "...The diagnostic radio signal ma"). There is no "References Cited," no "Cited By," and no claim set in the provided text. I therefore could not run the analysis on the record's own prior-art list. Instead I retrieved the granted claim set and sourced candidate references by search; every reference below is cited with a URL, and where I am unsure of a bibliographic detail I say so rather than guessing.

(b) Correction to a flag in the previously generated sections. The earlier "Patent summary" section stated that the verbatim issued claim set of US 11,402,421 could not be retrieved, and that claim 1 was the "registered to receive data service" apparatus claim taken from continuation publication US 20220299556 A1. That is now resolved and partially superseded:

• The granted '421 claim set is retrievable (https://patents.justia.com/patent/11402421; claim text also reproduced in the patentimages PDF at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/61/20/f9/f0aa9d5e94d08e/US11402421.pdf).
• In the granted patent, "registered to receive data service" is claim 14 (an independent method claim), not claim 1. Granted claim 1 instead recites "previously received data service at a premises…". The earlier section's labeling of claim 1 should be corrected accordingly. The earlier plain-language characterization of the family's scope remains broadly accurate.
• The previously generated section also listed "Adjusted expiration 2040-01-14"; a secondary source (patents-review.com) lists 2040-06-16. I treat the Google Patents figure as authoritative per the fetch instruction, and note the discrepancy without resolving it.

Everything below that depends on claim text uses the granted '421 text as retrieved.

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1. The claims at issue

The granted claims material to this analysis (paraphrase-accurate; quoted language taken verbatim from the retrieved text at https://patents.justia.com/patent/11402421):

Claim 1 (independent, method):

"determining a portion of a wired network to be tested for signal leakage; determining one or more mobile devices that previously received data service at a premises located within a threshold distance from the portion of the wired network; sending a signal via the wired network; causing the one or more mobile devices to determine whether at least a portion of the signal is detected wirelessly; and receiving, from the one or more mobile devices, information indicating whether the at least the portion of the signal was detected wirelessly."

Claim 14 (independent, method):

"determining, by a computing device, a portion of a wired network to be tested; determining one or more mobile devices that are registered to receive data service at a premises located within a threshold distance from the portion of the wired network; causing the one or more mobile devices to monitor for a wireless diagnostic signal; causing the wired network to emit the wireless diagnostic signal; and receiving, from the one or more mobile devices, information indicating whether the wireless diagnostic signal was detected."

Dependents retrieved: 2 (address-associated devices), 3 (leakage measurements + GPS-based status update), 4 (test time), 5 (neighbor users' devices), 6 (cause receiver activation), 7 (rotate while measuring + determine leak point from rotation parameters), 8 (FM tuners), 9 (select device based on likelihood of running out of power / not being used), 10 (device rotated while measuring), 11 (tilt sensor → measure signal direction), 12 (incentives), 13 (estimate leak location by comparing device reports against one another), 15 (testing-availability + download list of portions), 17 (test time).

Uncertainty flag: the retrieved text shows claims at least through 18; claim 16 and claim 18 bodies were elided in the source snippets, and the total claim count is not confirmed (the continuation publication has 21 claims). I cannot characterize claims 16, 18, or any claim above 18.

Observation: the independent claims are broad and largely functional. They do not recite Doppler, rotation, IMU correction, FM specifically, pseudo-random codes, incentives, or TDOA. Those features live only in dependents (claims 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13). Any obviousness attack therefore runs at two levels: (i) a broad, art-rich attack on independent claims 1 and 14, and (ii) a much more straightforward attack on the dependents, because the dependents recite exactly the techniques the leakage-detection art already used.

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2. Level of ordinary skill and key constructions

Proposed PHOSITA (absent the record's own statement): a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or a related field, plus 2–4 years of experience in CATV/HFC plant engineering, RF signal-leakage measurement, or wireless network operations; or a master's degree plus 1–2 years of such experience. This corresponds to the actual skill mix of the named inventors' field and of the references' authors.

Key terms:

• "a portion of a wired network to be tested for signal leakage" — the claim requires no particular identification technique; a zone, node, branch, or address-served segment all read on it. The spec expressly describes dividing a geographic area into zones (FIG. 9, Tables 1–2), and the wired-network topology of FIG. 13 shows branches off wired network node 302.
• "mobile devices that previously received / are registered to receive data service at a premises" — a subscription/account-based selection criterion. It does not require the device to be present at the premises at test time, and it does not require the device to be a cable modem. This is the narrowest, most defensible hook, and I analyze it carefully below.
• "detected wirelessly" — over-the-air reception of an egressed signal; the spec's example is FM at 108–137 MHz.
• "computing device" / "diagnostic server 122" — headend-side server cooperating with the termination system (TS 104).

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3. Prior art identified

Critical § 102 point on PA-1 (same-assignee art): A common error is to assume that because US 9,444,719 shares an inventor (Wolcott) and an assignee (Comcast) with the '421, it cannot be prior art. It can. Under AIA § 102(a)(1), PA-1 is a patent/published application that predates the '421's 2019-11-05 filing. The § 102(b)(1)(A) grace-period exception requires the disclosure to be the inventor's own within one year of filing; PA-1 issued 2016-09-13 and published 2015-01-29 — more than three years before. The § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception applies only to § 102(a)(2) art (i.e., applications published/patents issued under § 122(b)), not to § 102(a)(1) patents. PA-1 is therefore available under § 103. (Separately, PA-1 raises a potential nonstatutory double-patenting question against the '421, because both are commonly owned and commonly inventive; ODP is a distinct ground from § 103 and I flag it as outside this analysis.)

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4. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — Claims 1–13 are obvious over PA-1 in view of PA-2, further in view of PA-7 (or, alternatively, PA-3/PA-4).

Claim 1 element-by-element:

Claim 14 adds only the words "by a computing device," "monitor for," "emit," and a word-choice swap between "previously received" and "registered to receive." All three refinements are met: PA-1's system is controlled by a central computing device; PA-7's UE configuration is triggered by network signalling; PA-2's emission of the diagnostic signal is caused by the headend equipment. Claim 14 is, if anything, easier to meet than claim 1 because "registered to receive data service" is exactly the subscriber-registration relationship the '421 admits operators already maintain and that PA-7's UE population presupposes.

Dependents:

• Claim 2 / claim 5 (address-associated devices; neighbor devices): routine use of the operator's subscriber/billing database to map service addresses to devices. PA-1's whole premise is evaluating the network at the subscriber locations; PA-7 explicitly contemplates location-based UE selection. Using neighbors' devices merely expands the sample population — a predictable, if not inherent, extension once the "candidate device = subscriber at a premises near the suspect segment" criterion is adopted.
• Claim 3 (leakage measurements + GPS-based status update): PA-3 (GPS + leak amplitude + central processing) and PA-4 (GPS time base, TDOA).
• Claim 4 / claim 17 (determining a test time): plain scheduling; also inherent in drive-route/ride-out scheduling in PA-3 and in the periodic MDT reporting model of PA-7.
• Claim 6 / claim 8 (receiver activation; FM tuners): activation of the receiver is taught by PA-2/PA-3 (field receiver tunes to the tag signal) and, for the remote activation aspect, by PA-7. Using the FM tuner already present in a handset is the paradigm "simple substitution of one known element for another" — the pre-existing sensor is repurposed. Smartphone FM tuners were ubiquitous by 2019 and the '421 itself concedes "[m]obile devices (e.g., smart phones) are often equipped with an embedded FM (radio) tuner."
• Claim 7 / claim 10 / claim 11 (rotate while measuring; determine leak point from rotation parameters; tilt sensor → direction): this is the strongest obviousness ground, because it is the exact subject matter of PA-2 and PA-3. PA-3 is literally a "Doppler-based automated direction finding" system that derives bearing information and computes a leak location by triangulation; PA-2 derives leak location from measured Doppler shift as a function of receiver motion. The '421's own classification G01S 3/8022 is defined as "Direction-finders … using the Doppler shift introduced by the relative motion between source and receiver." Rotating a handheld device rather than translating a vehicle is a change in the manner of inducing relative motion — the same physical principle, same result. The spec's IMU/gyroscope calibration detail (Yaw/Pitch/Roll, magnetometer-assisted) is the kind of "compensation, calibration and/or normalization" that a POSITA would apply as a matter of ordinary engineering to correct for lower-grade MEMS sensors.
• Claim 9 (select device based on likelihood of running out of power / not being used): device-state-aware scheduling. Obvious to try; also directly motivated by the problem the '421 identifies — don't degrade the user's phone or experience. Selecting devices that are idle or charging is a conventional resource-aware scheduling heuristic in crowdsourced/UE-assisted measurement.
• Claim 12 (incentives): consider KSR-style "design incentive / market force" reasoning. Rewarding participants is a well-known technique for recruiting a voluntary device population, and the '421's own example ("Swing or rotate your mobile device to skip next advertisement") is the ad-verification/rewarded-ad paradigm already commercially ubiquitous well before 2019.
• Claim 13 (estimate leak location by comparing reports from devices against one another): this is multilateration/TDOA, disclosed in PA-2, PA-3 (triangulation from bearings), and PA-4 (TDOA), and the '421's own spec states the TDOA/GPS-location method.

Ground 1-alt — Substitute PA-3 as the primary Doppler reference.

If a fact-finder is uncomfortable with PA-2's prosecution status or its 2016-03-17 vs. 2015-09-16 filing-date discrepancy (see uncertainty flag below), PA-3 (2004) supplies the Doppler-AF-plus-triangulation-plus-GPS-plus-server architecture alone, and PA-1 supplies the HFC-plant, distributed-device, remote-diagnostic framework. The combination is if anything stronger because PA-3 is 15 years pre-critical-date.

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5. Motivation to combine (the dispositive issue) — explicit KSR/MPEP 2143 rationales

1. The '421's own Background supplies the problem and the motivation. It states: "hiring and training technicians, maintaining and updating test equipment for a wide area of networks, and manually updating the test results by the technicians may be inefficient and costly," and that FCC rules "mandate[] all cable operators to routinely identify and repair" leaks. A market force / known incentive to replace labor-intensive, wide-area manual leakage testing with automated measurement therefore predates the '421 by its own admission.
2. PA-1 (same assignee, same inventor) teaches exactly the architectural leap — use the network's own distributed deployed devices to detect and locate leakage remotely instead of sending technicians. One of ordinary skill reading PA-1 would be led directly to expand the device population from fixed CPE to the subscribers' mobile devices.
3. PA-7 supplies the technical mechanism for doing so with consumer phones: network-triggered UE measurement configuration plus location reporting. Combining PA-1's framework with PA-7's trigger/report mechanism yields the '421's method with predictable results — more measurement points, at lower cost, with no new dedicated hardware.
4. PA-2 and PA-3 supply the location mathematics and demonstrate that Doppler/TDOA on a moving receiver is a workable way to isolate a cable leak. Substituting a rotating handheld for a moving truck is using a known technique (Doppler-based direction finding) to improve a similar device (a portable leakage receiver) in the same way — KSR rationale (C).
5. Simple substitution (rationale (B)): the FM tuner of a smartphone for the dedicated leakage receiver. The '421 admits FM tuners are commonly embedded in phones; the substitution requires no change in the principle of operation, and it eliminates a hardware cost.
6. Design incentive / predictable variation (rationale (F)): selecting which phones to use, and when, from the operator's subscription database, is a conventional optimization that improves (i) physical proximity to the suspect segment and (ii) measurement diversity. Claim 9's battery/idle criteria are likewise conventional device-state selection.
7. Reasonable expectation of success: PA-2 and PA-3 both report that Doppler-based leak location works in the field; PA-1 reports that distributed-device leakage detection works; PA-7 reports that crowdsourced UE measurement works. Nothing in the combination is speculative; there is no "obvious to try" problem, let alone an unpredictable-result problem, at the level of the independent claims.

Reasonable expectation as to the "premises" limitation: because the operator already holds the address↔account↔device-number mapping (the '421 concedes this; so does the subscriber-selection step of the spec at FIG. 9 step 902 and Tables 1–2), selecting devices "registered to receive data service at a premises located within a threshold distance" of the suspect segment is the natural, and arguably the only sensible, way to pick a test population whose members are physically near the plant being tested. That is a predictable use of a known information asset for its most evident purpose.

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6. Likely patentee rebuttals and how they fare

Rebuttal A — "The art used calibrated, purpose-built leakage receivers; it would not have worked to use uncalibrated consumer FM tuners."
This is the '421's best argument, but it is largely answered by the '421's own dependents, not its independents. For claims 1/14 (which require only that devices determine whether the signal was detected and report that), no antenna calibration or amplitude accuracy is required — mere detection suffices. The calibration/IMU machinery appears only in dependents 7, 10, 11, and the '421 does not claim a specific calibration algorithm with any particularity. Where the patentee would need a teaching away, PA-1 and PA-2 instead motivate substituting cheaper, more numerous receivers.

Rebuttal B — "There was no suggestion to use subscriber devices; the art used operator-owned equipment."
PA-1 undercuts this: it expressly uses devices distributed among subscribers' areas. And PA-7's entire premise is substituting subscriber devices for operator drive-test fleets.

Rebuttal C — "Unexpected results / long-felt need."
Long-felt need cuts toward obviousness here: a decades-old, admitted, regulatory-driven need to reduce leakage-test cost. The burden would be on the patentee to show a stored-teaching away or an unexpected result, and the only candidate unexpected result (that uncalibrated phones can still localize leaks) is met by the patentee's own admission that the phones report coarse direction and that the server does the localization from multiple reports — a conventional division of labor.

Rebuttal D — "Same-assignee reference is not prior art."
Incorrect for PA-1, for the reasons in § 3.

Rebuttal E — Secondary considerations (commercial success, licensing, copying).
No evidence of any is available in this record; and note that if the '421's commercial implementation is Comcast's Xfinity network operations, nexus would have to be shown to the claimed method rather than to Comcast's broader service business.

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7. Conclusion

Assessment: The independent claims (1 and 14) are, in my analysis, highly likely obvious under § 103 over PA-1 in view of PA-7 (and/or PA-2/PA-3), with the strongest specific hook — the "registered to receive / previously received data service at a premises within a threshold distance" criterion — being a predictable, motivated use of the operator's own subscriber-address database rather than a patentable technical advance. The dependents (2–13) are more exposed still, because claims 7, 10, 11, 13 map almost point-for-point onto PA-2, PA-3, and PA-4, and because the '421's own classification (G01S 3/8022, Doppler shift from relative source–receiver motion) describes precisely the prior-art technique the dependents recite. Claims 9 and 12 are the weakest points of the claim set and read on conventional device-state scheduling and conventional participant-incentive schemes.

Countervailing consideration: the strongest non-obviousness posture is a narrow one — that the specific combination of (i) remote over-the-air activation of a handset's FM tuner by the cellular network for cable-leakage sensing, plus (ii) the subscription/address-based device-selection criterion, was not expressly assembled in a single reference. That is a § 103 argument, not a § 102 argument, and it depends on the patentee defeating the KSR combination rationales in § 5 — which on this record I do not think it can do, given the strength of the cost-reduction motivation the patent itself concedes.

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8. Explicit uncertainty flags

1. No "Prior Art section" was available. I could not analyze the record's own cited references because none were present in the supplied page text. If the actual References Cited / Cited By list exists, re-run this analysis against it — the grounds above are built from independently sourced art.
2. Claim 16 and claim 18 bodies are unretrieved, and the total claim count is unconfirmed (likely 20; possibly 21). Claims above 18 are not analyzed.
3. PA-4 (US 8,154,303 / US 2009/0096665 A1): front-page bibliographic data (title, inventors, assignee, exact filing/priority dates) was not verified from a primary source in this session; it is cited only for technical content.
4. PA-2 (US 9,882,663 B2): Google's "Similar documents" table lists a 2016-03-17 filing and 2018-01-30 grant, while the companion US 2017/0272184 A1 traces priority to applications filed 2015-09-16 and 2015-11-09. Do not rely on the exact filing date without verifying the front page. Either date is still comfortably pre-2019, so the § 103 conclusion is unaffected.
5. PA-7 (3GPP TS 37.320, MDT): cited from general technical knowledge, not retrieved in this session. Confirm the release and paragraph numbers before using it in a formal filing; if it cannot be pinned, PA-1 + PA-2 + PA-3 still carry Ground 1, because PA-1 itself describes remote, central control of distributed measurement devices.
6. PHOSITA definition is my proposal, not the record's. A higher-skill definition would strengthen the obviousness case; a lower-skill definition would weaken it slightly.
7. Double patenting is not analyzed. PA-1 and the '421 are commonly owned and commonly inventive; a nonstatutory double-patenting challenge is a separate question I flag but do not evaluate.
8. I did not obtain the '421's prosecution history, so I cannot say whether any of PA-1 through PA-6 were cited, distinguished, or overcome during examination — which is material to any Art recognized / teaching away argument.