"Cellular Networks Currently Suck. Badly", Nokia Says

from the doubledouble-speakspeak dept

The head of Nokia's WiMax business is trying to deliver some anti-hype, saying that WiMax is a great technology, but won't live up to the wild expectations people have for it. More interestingly, though, he says "Cellular networks haven't taken off [for data] because cellular networks currently suck. Badly. It's our fault -- we've done it badly." While it may sound like a frank admission from one of the industry's major network suppliers, given the guy's WiMax connections and WiMax's penchant for attracting hype, it's hard to see it as anything but a thinly veiled attempt to talk up the technology -- the inference being that WiMax will make all the wireless broadband dreams left unfulfilled by 3G come true. It looks to be a part of Nokia's big turnaround on WiMax: remember this is the same company that quit the WiMax Forum at one point, only to be pressured into rejoining by Intel. The exec also had something to say about the long-awaited mobile WiMax standard, saying "a lot of it is un-implementable," and that vendors will pick and choose what parts to implement. Um, what's the point of the standard then?

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