AT&T completes 7.2 Mbps software updates, but faster iPhones still in the future

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Now I'm jealous I'm here in Salt Lake City and I haven't gotten over 1.5mb yet. Come on AT&T we're waiting. :-)

My 3G speed in St. Louis, MO went off the charts last night.

Using the speedtest.net app by Ookla, and the Speed Test app by Xtreme Labs, I repeatedly clocked 3G download speed around 4mb.

I live in Australia and we've had 7.2mbps for a couple of years now down here (in fact the best and fastest, albeit most expensive 3G network, Telstra, has just finished upgrading their network to 42mbps I'm pretty sure). That 42mbps is on every single tower of theirs which covers 99% of the population.

You get similar issues with backhaul here but I think they've been keeping up with it pretty well. I use it with a usb modem and it is pretty good.

I believe they can afford to do this (and is the primary reason AT&T can't) as they have a usage charging model, not an all-you-can-eat model. Once you guys realise that having a usage charge model isn't the worst idea in the world (which it looks like your telcos are trying to convince you of) then you can enjoy a network with much higher coverage and stability.

Low price, speed, reliability, coverage.

Pick any three and you have a winner. You can't have all four though.

NK

So let me get this straight.. AT&T is JUST starting to roll out 7.2Mb HSPA?!

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they finally offer HSPA service in Vermont, but at this rate the rest of the world will be on LTE and they'll just figure out that they can upgrade to HSPA+

The issue is that it doesn't matter how fast the network is when you never get a good connection....

No matter how all of this gets spinned by AT&T, they totally missed the boat, and they're screwing their customers. I really need to be able to use tethering, but I can't because AT&T hasn't rolled out whatever upgrade that they need to do for use to be able to do this. I thought about getting a separate 3G plan from them, but that requires another contract, and they only option that they have is for unlimited data at ANOTHER $60 a month! The least that they could do is offer tiered plans. I don't want to spend my whole day using 3G on my MacBook Pro. I just need it occasionally when I'm onsite with a customer who cannot let me on their network. The way that AT&T has handled this has been very shoddy. If they had competition from other carriers for iPhone customers, they would have upgraded their network a lot sooner. I think that they owe us all a huge refund for not delivering a network that allows the iPhone to do everything that it's capable of doing.

I'm occasionally seeing ~4 Mbps on my 3GS in Washington DC, so they must be testing something here. ~3 Mbps is more typical of my speed tests around here.

"Hey everyone, We just turned on the 7.2Mbps network!!!!!!!"

"Well, no the backend connection is still the same, so your speeds will be the same, BUT We have turned on the FASTEST* network in the US!!!!!!!!"

That is like selling a car will get 100 mpg, but the fuel needed to achieve that is not available yet. Until that fuel is available it will go slow, and probably stall....a lot.....

Isn't software the easy part of this upgrade?