While the WiMAX Forum gained five new carriers last week--and also recently welcomed new vendor members, including Alcatel, Siemens and Navini--founding member Nokia opted out of the group.

Several members of the WiMAX Forum confirmed Monday that Nokia recently failed to renew its dues for forum membership. However, they played down Nokia’s departure from the group as something that has been apparent for months and that will have no ill effects on the group’s push for market acceptance of 802.16a WiMAX technology.

According to officials from two current forum member companies, Nokia became disenchanted with WiMAX within a couple of months after helping to publicly launch the WiMAX Forum in early 2003. Nokia officials told several people at that point that its corporate strategy was shifting away from WiMAX, at least until the technology appeared closer to broad market deployment, the sources said.

“Nokia was really a non-factor,” one source said. “If there is a single large company whose membership has been most meaningful within the last year, it’s been Intel.” Intel’s strategic plans call for laptop manufacturers to eventually adopt WiMAX chips as broadly as its Centrino Wi-Fi chips have been. Also, Ron Resnick, an Intel employee, is the president of the forum.

Nokia’s departure didn’t surprise or concern other forum members. “They dropped out in substance about a year ago,” said Carlton O’Neal, vice president of marketing at forum member Alvarion. “It came up again now because the membership fee came due, and they just didn’t renew.”

O’Neal added, “Now that Nokia has left, we don’t sit around at the forum and say, ‘OK, now WiMAX isn’t real.’ Big companies like Alcatel and Siemens have joined, but we weren’t saying before that it wasn’t viable without them.”

The forum hopes to have interoperability tests for “WiMAX-Certified” products running later this year, with the first round of certified products hitting the market next year.