Cellular connectivity has become a cornerstone of the Internet of Things, linking everything from smart meters and logistics trackers to connected cars and wearables, and putting new pressure on how standard essential patents for NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1 and V2X are licensed on fair terms as deployments scale across industries. Yet licensing frameworks remain fragmented and immature compared with smartphones: the economic value of connectivity varies wildly between verticals, patent pools only cover parts of the landscape, ETSI declarations are opaque, and U.S. SEP litigation has more than doubled in a decade, largely driven by patent-assertion entities, making Cellular IoT a particularly unpredictable and legally risky SEP arena to navigate. …