Canada's Rogers Communications announced last week that it will work with long-time vendor Ericsson on a trial of UMTS and high-speed downlink packet access technology and applications, the latest of several projects aimed at bringing these technologies into North American networks. The companies also will be testing a converged IP multimedia subsystem architecture.

Cingular Wireless and other carriers have held UMTS trials, conducted HSDPA test calls and announced general plans for the deployment of these technologies, but Rogers' upcoming test in Toronto is the first for the Canadian provider of multiple wireline and wireless services.

“We're in the process of deploying our trial network in Toronto, which is our most challenging market with all the buildings in the urban core,” said Bob Berner, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Rogers Communications' wireless unit. “We'll be up and running with actual connectivity very shortly.”

Berner said the trial, which will involve Rogers employees, eventually will transition to a commercial service offering sometime in 2006, though he said the company has not yet decided on a more specific time frame.

“[In the trial], we'll be running a broad range of applications, and we have a number of different verifications that we'll go through to see how well the network supports things like streaming, Internet access and other services,” Berner said.

Mark Henderson, president and CEO of Ericsson Canada, said, “These technologies are really commercial platforms now, and it's not like a new technology is being created. This will be an implementation trial.” Henderson said Ericsson has seen many carriers wanting to test UMTS/HSDPA and IMS in tandem because “IMS will be the glue that allows multiple forms of broadband access to coexist.”

Berner said Rogers is not yet ready to publicize its plans for IMS deployment but sees it as the foundation for the company's ongoing quadruple-play service strategy. He expects the industry at large to have a gradual evolution to using IMS as that kind of unifying architecture.

“All of [Rogers Communications'] services right now have their own core networks that are vertical,” he said. “IMS will take them out of that structure and put them in one place. It will make the network irrelevant to the customer using the different services. But it's not going to be a big splash or sudden changeover.”