Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei has announced that it is suing Verizon over 12 patent infringements - the latest in a series of challenges to the relationship between Huawei and the United States.

As reported by The Verge, Huawei is seeking compensation and royalties for Verizon's use of its technology in computer networking, download security, and video communications, according to a lawsuit filed in the Eastern and Western district courts in Texas.

While the patents do not directly involve 5G, a person "familiar with the matter" told The Verge that they were very important to functioning networks. Many of the patents have titles such as "Sending Method, Receiving and Processing Method and Apparatus for Adapting Payload Bandwidth for Data Transmission," and as Huawei is the biggest manufacturer of telecom equipment (spending almost 15 percent of the company's revenue on research and development in 2018) it's no surprise the company would be so concerned about possible infringement.

In a statement, Huawei said, "Since 2015, Huawei has received more than $1.4 billion dollars in patent license fees. To date, it has also paid over $6 billion dollars for the legitimate use of patented technologies developed by industry peers. 80 percent of these license fees have gone to companies in the United States."

Huawei's chief legal officer Song Liuping also said that "Verizon's products and services have benefited from patented technology that Huawei developed over many years of research and development. For years now we have successfully negotiated patent license agreements with many companies. Unfortunately, when no agreement can be reached, we have no choice but to seek a legal remedy."

We have reached out to Verizon for comment.

Huawei is apparently not demanding a specific sum as compensation because it would need more information to come up with an accurate estimate, but it could be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Huawei is focusing on only 12 patents for the moment because it reportedly has evidence that Verizon is using them. The courts prefer to deal with small numbers, but the Wall Street Journal reported in June that the Chinese company was seeking licensing fees for more than 200 of its patents from Verizon.

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