You've got to excuse Eric. He suffers from a rare memory disorder, but only as it relates to Nokia. He gets testy and rude when anyone highlights the shortcomings of his cult company. Dr. J's thoroughly correct admonitions about UMTS unfortunately drive him to paroxysms of insults, bile, and loooooooong blasts of heated irrelevant blather. It's quite preditable so it's probably best to let him stew in his own juices about the issue.
You are nevertheless absolutely correct. Nokia has flubbed UMTS for many, many years, not just last year. Its biggest failure was in its backyard, Sonera.
Here are a few more examples:
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And especially this:
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Sonera and Nokia sign up for 3G in Finland
4 December 2000
Finnish telecoms operator Sonera and vendor Nokia have signed a three-year contract to provide third-generation (3G) mobile Internet services across Finland.
Sonera has chosen Nokia to supply its 3G Internet Protocol (IP) mobility network and wideband code-division multiplexing access (WCDMA) radio network. The companies have already worked together on GSM and GPRS networks and plan to launch 3G services in major cities by January 2002.
"We believe in an evolutionary-based network that supports seamless services," said Anni Vepsäläinen, Sonera's senior vice-president for mobile operations. "Exploiting GSM and GPRS networks is part of our strategy."
Sonera's partnership with Norwegian telecoms operator Enitel, the Broadband Mobile Consortium, has won a UMTS licence to supply 3G services in Norway.
Do you think that Nokia and its grandiose UMTS visions had anything to do with Sonera's enormous and embarrassing losses--bigger than the entire nation of Finland paid in one year as reparations to he USSR as result of WWII? I do. I most certainly do.
Depending on how you measure them, the Sonera losses amount to 3% of Finland's GDP.
Interesting that Sonera got into the German license auction, and lost its ass, even though Finland held a beauty contest for its own spectrum. At the time, Nokia was promising that UMTS was just around the corner. It should to take responsibility for some of the losses but I have yet to see anything remotely resembling such a thing.
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