Nokia: WiMAX is the new Betamax
By Tim Conneally | Published April 2, 2009, 11:34 AM
Representing a veritable 180 degree turn in opinion, a Nokia spokesperson told the Financial Times today that the company no longer believes WiMAX is a viable wireless mobile standard.
"I don't think [WiMAX's] future is very promising. This is a classic example of industry standards clashing, and somebody comes out as the winner and somebody has to lose," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of New Markets at Nokia. "Betamax was there for a long time, but VHS dominated the market. I see exactly the same thing happening here."
That wasn't the case four years ago, when Nokia struck out with Intel to encourage WiMAX adoption in the United States. The Finnish company then got on board with Sprint in its WiMAX endeavors in 2007, acting as an infrastructure provider for the network that eventually became known as XOHM, and now Clear.
In fact, Nokia's confidence in WiMAX didn't begin to show substantial cracks until the beginning of this year when it discontinued its WiMAX edition N810 tablet that was slated to be a U.S.-exclusive XOHM/Clear device.
Vanjoki put his money on LTE as the future of wireless broadband, which currently only has 26 network operator commitments worldwide, according to the GSA, but has the most support from infrastructure providers.
By 2015, Vanjoki estimated, the international LTE network will adequately cover "the most important places in the world."
So, he implies that WiMAX is superior but there is more money in the inferior?
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|no, the idea is that LTE is an upgrade path from GSM/3G. WiMAX is all new equip. Carriers haven't recouped money from 3G investment yet, so they're not looking to drop a ton of cash.
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|While LTE is a more logical upgrade path from HSPA equipment used by most GSM carriers the upgrade cost isn't trivial. It may cost less for a GSM carrier to go LTE than WiMax but the cost will still be in the millions if not billions for the national mobile carriers. Not only is there significant cost to upgrading the equipment on the towers but you have to upgrade the data connections to the towers as well. It doesn't do you any good to have a cell site with equipment that can transfer 30+ Megabits/s if the tower doesn't have an Internet connection that can keep up.
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|Err..... Since when does WiMax not need backhaul? Strange reasoning out there.....
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