At the time industry analysts were certain that while chipsets existed to handle the spectrum, there wasn't a handset on the market yet that could take advantage of it.

But Public Mobile, the new moniker for licence winner BMV Holdings of Toronto, showed Thursday at least one cellphone in the world can do the job. "Those that have written 'Maybe [our company] will get handsets, maybe they won't', here they are," crowed CEO Alek Krastajic.

The demonstration for the press used a ZTE C78 CDMA handset that Krastajic said is sold now by MetroPCS in the U.S. ZTE needed two weeks to install a filter for the Qualcomm chipset that works over the 1.9Ghz spectrum.

Public Mobile doesn't actually have its licence yet -- Industry Canada still has to approve of the holding company's ownership, which includes U.S. venture capital -- so it got a temporary licence for the demo to make calls.

The signal ran from the handset to a Nortel Networks base station, which radioed it to Public Mobile's switch in Ottawa, where it connected to the public phone system. Technically, it was the first wireless call made by any of the nine new licence winners over spectrum acquired in the auction.