Nokia used to praise Sprint for its bold effort to roll-out a WiMAX network in the United States. As market moves, so does the attitude of the Finnish giant. Even though we supposed to see few Nokia WiMAX-enabled devices last year, nothing from that actually happened. Quite the contrary – Nokia killed the N810 WiMAX edition.
And now, as most of the industry is gathering around LTE, they say WiMAX is a “failed idea” and is considered a “Wireless Betamax.”
“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,” Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki told to The Financial Times.
He went on, adding: “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.”
To be fair, I can understand Nokia’s decision to pull off from the WiMAX market. At some point, it seemed as an ideal move to grab the slice of the U.S. market share by partnering with Sprint. However, as Sprint struggled to launch its network on time, the idea failed. In that sense, it seems as a better strategy to prepare for the upcoming LTE revolution…
[Via: FT]