Quite honestly I think that we have already rejoined [the WiMax Forum]. The decision [to leave] was perhaps made too much on a practical basis than with regard to what the rest of the world is doing, Sari Baldauf, executive VP and general manager of Nokia’s networking business told journalists at the Nokia Connections 2004 event in Helsinki.
Nokia’s backtrack adds additional weight to the WiMax Forum’s efforts to ensure cross-vendor interoperability for equipment based on the IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area network standard.
But it is also symptomatic of the Finnish mobile equipment giant’s renewed efforts to court favor from industry watchers. Many observers have felt recently that the company frequently marches too much to the beat of its own drum, sometimes at the expense of broader industry trends. Nokia’s limited range of clamshell handsets, until Monday’s new product unveilings, is a case in point.
Nokia’s withdrawal from the WiMax Forum was made public in the second week of May although the company said it would continue to support standardization efforts around the technology.
The early versions, ‘a’ and ‘d’, are not a big market for us. There would be no point in us having a big involvement there. 802.16e [the mobile variant] is in a very early phase. It’s very hard to say this or that in terms of its commercial viability, Nokia told ComputerWire at the time.
The latest turnaround does not appear to represent an accelerated WiMax product roadmap for Nokia, however.
Nokia, along with Intel and Fujitsu, was one of the WiMax Forum’s founding members in April 2003. To date, no WiMax-certified 802.16 equipment has reached the market, although WiMax-ready products from vendors such as Alvarion Ltd are starting to emerge.
