Despite past failures, Intel continues to explore every angle to win itself a significant role in the wireless market. Its latest has uncanny echoes of its WiMAX adventure, when it invested in several operators to support their roll-outs of its preferred technology. With WiFi-first phone services proving to be a more effective disruptor of the 3GPP model than WiMAX was, Intel is taking a stake in US MVNO FreedomPop, one of the pioneers of the approach. The funding, of undisclosed size, is mainly targeted at the development of FreedomPop’s own handset, which will run on Intel’s SoFIA system-on-chip and will be optimized for WiFi-first usage (in which the handset defaults to the WLAN, only transferring to cellular when there is…