Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Mobile phone giant Nokia has unveiled plans to work alongside chip maker Intel to speed up the development of the high-speed wireless technology WiMax.

The two technology heavyweights will push for the WiMAx standard IEEE 802.16e to be ratified by the end of 2005, as well as developing mobile clients and network infrastructure.

"Even though we and the industry as a whole are at the early stages of discovery and development, the industry momentum is remarkable," said Sean Maloney, executive VP and general manager of Intel's Mobility Group.

"To have innovators like Nokia working to bring WiMax and other broadband wireless technologies to the masses is very encouraging," he added.

WiMax is a wireless communication technology capable of delivering a bandwidth of up to 75 Mbps and up to a distance of a mile from the base station and can be used for a number of applications, including 'last mile' broadband connections, hotspots and high-speed enterprise connectivity for business.

But Nokia has had an uneasy relationship with the technology, at one point withdrawing from the standards group the WiMax Forum. It is believed to have harboured fears that WiMax could potentially undermine some of the work it has carried out on 3G mobile networks.

Nokia now believes that 3G and WiMax will complement each other.

Intel has led the way in pushing WiMax following the success of its Centrino chips enabling Wi-Fi access via laptops.