After almost seven years, I was finally awarded a patent: 7,170,862. It’s assigned to my previous employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Until I started this process, I never imagined how long the USP&TO could take to finally assign a patent. Now I’m waiting to see if any of my other patents filed by Cisco will be awarded.
This actually happened back in January, but since I was never notified, I researched it myself after the recent news of Cisco opening up IOS to 3rd party developers.