Nokia has dismissed the prospects of the WiMax wireless mobile standard, claiming it is doomed to meet the same fate as Betamax, the video format that lost out to VHS in a war over technology standards in the 1970s and 1980s.

The world's biggest maker of mobile phones is one of the founding members of the WiMax Forum, the industry body set up to promote the standard. The Finnish company is betting the 4G wireless standard LTE - Long Term Evolution - will dominate the mobile world by 2015 and WiMax will be the big loser.