Nokia’s love-hate relationship with WiMAX has taken a swing to the amorous side. The vendor announced today that it is partnering with Intel to develop 802.16e mobile WiMAX technology.

Under the collaboration Nokia and Intel will jointly develop mobile clients, network infrastructure and explore market development opportunities--an arrangement that Intel has with several other equipment vendors. The partnership, however, only extends to the development of 802.16e products while eschewing 802.16-2004 (or 802.16d), the fixed-wireless symmetrical version of the standard. 802.16d has been fully standardized, and vendors are waiting for final certification trials in the WiMAX Forum’s labs in Malaga, Spain. While many vendors expect to make a splash with the initial fixed-wireless version of WiMAX, most agree that WiMAX’s biggest impact will occur when full mobility is brought to the spec.

Nokia was a founding member of the WiMAX Forum, but it mysteriously dropped from the Forum’s roles in 2004, saying it wanted to pursue other technologies until WiMAX was closer to market deployment. While fully certified 802.16-2004 products are expected to start rolling off assembly lines late this year and early next, fully commercialized 802.16e products are still a few years off. The WiMAX Forum is currently finalizing the standard. Nokia has since rejoined the Forum, and company officials said they are committed to making WiMAX a central part of its radio access infrastructure portfolio.

Nokia today also announced it has begun development of a cellular technology known as 3.9G or by the rather ungainly acronym UTRAN LTE (Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network Long Term Evolution). Based upon current high-speed downlink and uplink packet access (HSDPA and HSUPA), the technology is intended to expand the two technologies theoretical downstream and upstream capacities (14.4 Mb/s and 5.7 Mb/s respectively) to well beyond 50 Mb/s. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is currently evaluating the technology; Nokia expects a standard to emerge in 2007.