Apparently, AT&T has some advancements planned for its networks that will raise the top speed of their 3G network to 20 megabits/second. Right now it’s at about 3.6Mbit, so that’s quite a jump. They’re being coy about the actual changes, which makes me suspicious. They’re already doubling the speed with a software update, they say, and the big jump to 20Mbit will require no major infrastructure changes. It’s almost as if they’ve been capable of high speed all this time and have simply been throttling it. That would just be evil, but more importantly it wouldn’t be profitable, so we can assume it’s not the case.

The 20Mbit 3G network will serve as a stopgap until the planned 2010 move to 700MHz 4G. And meanwhile my little T-Mo Trace takes 30 seconds to load Google in its little microbrowser.