Earlier this week, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson noted that he had been informed by a "T-Mobile manager" that the carrier would begin offering the iPhone 3GS (but not the iPhone 4) by the end of this year. The claim was met with widespread skepticism, in part because, unlike AT&T and the iPhone's other carriers around the world, T-Mobile's 3G network operates within the 1700 MHz spectrum that is apparently not supported by the iPhone.
But more claims of a 1700 MHz-compatible iPhone surfaced today from Canadian firm Quebecor, which is launching mobile service under its Vidotron brand, which will use the frequency band for its network. According to a company executive vice president, an announcement about a compatible iPhone coming to the carrier should occur "in the coming months".
Perhaps the juiciest thing to come out of the launch today, though, happened during the Q&A session of the launch press conference, where one of the company's executive vice presidents apparently noted that Apple is in the process of manufacturing an AWS-compliant iPhone and that we should "expect an announcement in the coming months" regarding Vidotron's launch. That certainly lends credence to recent rumors that T-Mobile USA is preparing to offer the iPhone -- like Vidotron, it uses AWS 3G -- but just as with the perpetual Verizon rumors, we're going to hold off on calling this one gold until we see the units on a store shelf.
Like Engadget, we continue to view these rumors with some skepticism, as claims of the iPhone coming to various carriers have been rampant for quite some time with no results, and there have been no rumors coming from Apple's Asian suppliers regarding a tweaked manufacturing process that would be required for the hardware.
