Hi everybody,
1 month ago while I was visiting Montreal (during the jazz festival... yeah), I did a manual network search with my european Nokia N70 and the following network appeared besides the usual ROGERS (CAN 720):
CAN 970 (WCDMA).
I was able to detect it various times in various zones of the Montreal Island but not everywhere or not every time, so I suppose it is some kind of test network.
Of course I was not able to register to it, neither with a canadian nor with a roaming sim-card.
there are no local news about a new network being launched there.
Does anybody have any info?

Interesting. UMTS in North America is supposed to be at 1900mhz. I also own an N70. It is supposed to be 2100mhz.

I don't suppose Rogers is testing some kind of UMTS 2100 setup for European roamers in the entire Quebec/Montreal region. Perhaps that network is part of a dual UMTS 1900/2100 test setup.

Theoretically, UMTS is reserved for use in the 1700/2100 Mhz bands in the US as well but as we have seen Cingular is going for the 850/1900 Mhz bands instead.

"The UMTS spectrum allocated by ITU is already used in North America. The 1900 MHz range is used for 2G (PCS) services, and 2100 MHz range is used for satellite communications. Regulators are trying to free up the 2100 MHz range for 3G services, though UMTS in North America will still have to share spectrum with existing 2G services in the 1900 MHz band. 2G GSM services elsewhere use 900 MHz and 1800 MHz and therefore do not share any spectrum with planned UMTS services. Initial rollout of UMTS in Canada will also be handled exclusively by the 1900 MHz band."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS#Spectrum_allocation

http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=59120

Even though the document refers to the US, 1700/2100 Mhz spectrum has been allocated in both countries for later overflow use.

Ericsson is also testing a UMTS/HSDPA network so this might be what Andytel picked up:

http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/press/rel...3-1034298.shtml

Thanks people I know you would have given some good hint!!!
I'm back in Montreal now, and I was again able to detect that network: CAN 980 (probably I did not remember well the MNC before)

I read on Howard's Forums that Fido is also in the process of testing UMTS. Seeing that Fido is also part of Rogers, I don't know what kind of sense it would make to upgrade both Fido and Rogers to UMTS.

Perhaps you saw Roger's test network in Quebec and Fido's test network in Montreal.