Here’s some beta info from Kevin Cloud & Paul Wedgwood interview taken by Gamespy:
To that end, a rolling beta is planned for Quake Wars, which will initially start small but eventually roll out the public in some limited capacity. “It’s hard to nail down a date,” says Cloud, when asked when a public beta might start. “We’ll start off with an Activision development team, and then a ‘friends and family’ type of group with all the maps, and then in terms of going out to the public, it would be a limited amount of maps to get feedback on the general types of gameplay and objectives and see how they play out.”