Nokia finally dumps WiMax


Posted on April 2, 2009  /  1 Comments

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile terminal maker as well as the WiMax Forum Board member, has put the last nail to the coffin of WiMax. “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 yesterday in San Francisco, the Financial Times reports.

 “I don’t think the future is very promising [for WiMax]. This is a classic example of industry standards clashing, and somebody comes out as the winner and somebody has to lose. Betamax was there for a long time, but VHS dominated the market. I see exactly the same thing happening here,” Vanjoki added. 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 Vanjoki. He said Verizon and AT&T were “going full blast” in rolling out LTE networks in the US.

Nokia first publicly drifted from WiMax in December 2008 when it welcomed Verizon’s plan for LTE. Then in January 2009 it announced ending the production of N810 tablet, the only WiMax device it has ever made targeting Sprint Nextel’s Xohm WiMAX efforts. In March the Finnish vendor dismissed WiMAX as a 4G standard, calling it a “niche play,” and saying that the technology’s lack of backwards compatibility and a clear roadmap were major drawbacks.

Finally yesterday it said WiMax “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.”

1 Comment


  1. Nokia finally dumps WiMax is a very good article news……
    Awesome news…….
    ——–
    Girish
    ——–
    mobile phones for sale–mobile phones for sale