 |
|
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
|
| Nokia (L) chatting with AT&T (R) |
Nokia has dismissed the prospects of the WiMax wireless mobile standard, claiming it is doomed to meet the same fate as Betamax, the video format that lost out to VHS in a war over technology standards in the 1970s and 1980s.
The world’s biggest maker of mobile phones is one of the founding members of the WiMax Forum, the industry body set up to promote the standard. The Finnish company is betting the 4G wireless standard LTE – Long Term Evolution – will dominate the mobile world by 2015 and WiMax will be the big loser.
WiMax has suffered a delayed roll-out in the US, but its main backer, the chipmaker Intel, has claimed the technology is taking hold in other parts of the world. “I don’t see that WiMax is taking hold anywhere in a big way,” said Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s head of sales and manufacturing, at a Nokia launch event in San Francisco yesterday…
His remarks were the most dismissive by Nokia of WiMax to date.
“It’s my prediction that by 2015, we will have an LTE network that will cover most of the important places in the world and that will give us the coverage and capacity we need,” said Mr Vanjoki. He said Verizon and AT&T were “going full blast” in rolling out LTE networks in the US.
I like the concept of RF-based communications competing with copper and fibre – just to kick everyone along in the direction of providing bandwidth capable of lots of IPTV for example. But, I ain’t holding my breath waiting.
