Bell, Telus to sell iPhone next month: report

Bell Canada and Telus will begin selling Apple's iPhone in November, breaking Rogers's lock on the wildly popular device, according to a report.

The two phone companies — Canada's second- and third-biggest cellphone providers respectively after market leader Rogers — will launch the iPhone on their new, jointly constructed network next month, the Globe and Mail reported on Monday.

Rogers has had a de facto exclusive on the device since last summer, because it had the only compatible cellphone network. Bell and Telus announced last year they were building a $1 billion next-generation network to take advantage of hot devices such as the iPhone and Google's Android phones.

Rogers had been using the GSM and HSPA standard, while Bell and Telus were on the CDMA standard.

Bell, Telus and Apple did not confirm the move, which the newspaper attributed to unnamed sources.

Bell announced on Monday that its portion of the joint network was launching months ahead of plan. The new network will offer mobile internet speeds up to 21 megabits per second with more than 20,000 towns and cities covered, the company said.

Rogers has already begun rollout of a network that offers the same speeds. Currently, virtually no existing phones — including the iPhone 3G S — can handle these speeds, though new ones are expected to.