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Report: Hesse intervened in Nokia-WiMAX fight
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Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse emailed an Intel executive to try and smooth over tensions following comments a Nokia executive made last week at an event in San Francisco. Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's head of sales and manufacturing, reportedly compared WiMAX to Betamax, the video format that met its demise when VHS triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s.
"I don't see that WiMAX is taking hold anywhere in a big way," Vanjoki was quoted as saying. "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."
Intel, one of WiMAX's strongest proponents and a major investor in WiMAX service provider Clearwire, was apparently angered by the comments, according to a report on the website TheInquirer.net. Hesse is said to have emailed Intel to tell them that Vanjoki called him to deny comparing WiMAX to Betamax. Sprint holds a 51 percent stake in Clearwire.
"He was making general references to how technology winners and losers are chosen, that it's not the best technology that wins, but it's also other issues like the best business model, [and] marketing that determine which standards win and lose," Hesse is quoted as saying in the email. Hesse added that Vanjoki told him that media reports had taken his comments out of context.
"He said the author plugged LTE and WiMAX into his framework," Hesse is quoted as saying. "He was providing a framework of what determines winning and losing standards, and did not opine on which ones will win and lose."
Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Walsh told FierceWireless that the company would not comment on cross-company confidential communications or internal CEO communications. "I do believe his comments were taken out of context," she said, referring to Vanjoki.
For more:
- see this article
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Comments
Posted by Anonymous | April 7, 2009 - 3:21pm
Hesse lives in a dream world. Look at his commercials starring himself. At a time when the country and the world hate greedy CEOs, he shows up in a commercial. He’s out of touch with mass sentiment.
Why – Max (802.16e) was dead on arrival in developed countries. No scale to compete with rival technologies and evolutions. Again the wunderkind dreams agendas completely disconnected from realities.
Posted by Anonymous | April 7, 2009 - 5:46pm
Post at 3.21 pm is very biased. WIMAX is thriving and has done well in 140 commercial deployments worldwide and just two in the US. It has been deployed in S Korea since 2004-5 in pre-wimax and now 802.16e format. Please do your DD before you critique.
Posted by Anonymous | April 8, 2009 - 2:16am
Clearwire and Sprint are crazy.
The dirty little secret is that Sprint had many people who were planning the deployment of WiMax. CW fired them and in many markets (hello FL) canned the deployment.
WiMax as a stand alone is silly and really not needed. TMO, VZ, AT&T will all eventually offer top notch speeds as well as other services with a more robust network.
Just wait when the 2nd tier (Metro, Leap) jump on the product in the next 2 years.
CW is clueless - just wait until they bomb. Who will they blame.
Posted by Anonymous | April 8, 2009 - 2:21am
Clearwire is like a rudderless ship. Sure their angry at the comments - but the comments is 100% on the ball.
The reason is that we have a maturing wireless wireless sector with deep consumer inroads. Even as intel, Comcast and BH and Cox look athe future the fact is that they have to compete against the wireless folks - and as a stand alone entitu CW doesn't have the network, pricing or products to compete.
As far as the $ being spent...does anyone want to buy my old Betamax machine.Mr. Wolff??? Mr. McCaw???
Posted by Anonymous | April 8, 2009 - 3:17am
Nokia is under serious threat from iPhone and RIM in the 3G space. Not to mention they are behind in WiMAX. Th eonly hope they have is to try to pitch their standards & technology leadership in LTE, which is also doubtful.
So what does the exec of a sore loser company say, bash up WiMAX. For those who do not LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. The name was chosen with lots of care, because the Vodafone, T-Mobile, Oranges and Telefonica's of the world have sunk mega billions into 3G (WCDMA+HSPA) that really required an iPhone and RIM boost to grow up as a technology. Now they have to scale their HSPA networks and there is no money for anything else. Meanwhile WiMAX offers 4-6 times the performance of HSPA. So what they do, create great LTE power point charts using 20x20MHz channels which very few handful of operators possess (none of the big ones do) and claim they are better than WiMAX on paper and in smoking mirrors FPGA demos. WiMAX meanshile is real with a global SKU. Unless LTE proponents have magical powers, for them to achieve what WiMAX has will take them 3 years or more depending on how much HSPA will be prolonged. So my bet is on WiMAX which will have a solid lead and win in the long run, because Intel will make sure not a single PC ships without WiMAX and WiFi
Posted by Max Smart | April 8, 2009 - 6:55am
How many WiMax 802.16 E subscribers are there in the world? Nokia developed WiMax early, then dropped it when there was paltry demand. WiMax, and Beta Max suffer from the problem. SCALE. Wireles is a scale game. SCALE means low costs. SCALE means strength.
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