BioWare wants bigger lightsaber raves and "bring your Wookie to work" days in Star Wars: The Old Republic. It also wants more uniform server populations. To that end, an announcement on the official website detailed testing initiatives for "high-population server tech" allowing BioWare to "significantly increase current server populations." BioWare says once the tech goes live, any characters remaining on an origin server will get moved to the new high population destination.
All characters on East Coast servers got copied onto the new Test server, and access instructions appear on the post as well. This could represent the stirrings of The Old Republic's transition into free-to-play this fall.