Nokia has dismissed the prospects of WiMAX becoming a serious player in the next-generation mobile technology era. “I don’t think the future is very promising [for WiMAX],” said Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s head of sales and manufacturing, according to a Financial Times (FT) report. “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.”

Mobile WiMAX technology is championed by Intel and has so far seen strongest operator support from US carrier Sprint Nextel and service provider Clearwire. Clearwire’s high-profile plan to roll-out mobile WiMAX across the US has already received a US$3.2 billion cash investment from Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google and Bright House Networks. However, the vast majority of mobile operators around the world have already pledged allegiance to rival next-generation mobile technology LTE, with initial commercial deployments from the likes of NTT DoCoMo and Verizon Wireless expected next year. The latest statements from Nokia demonstrate that mobile WiMAX has lost the support of the world’s largest mobile handset vendor. In January, the Finnish company stopped production of its only WiMAX device, the N810. Recently, network equipment vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel Networks have also scaled back their investment in WiMAX in favour of LTE. “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,” Vanjoki told the FT.