iPhone 4 doubles 3G bandwidth speeds!!!

The iPhone 4 is catching a lot of criticism for an antenna issue that is causing some users to lose connectivity when holding the iPhone 4 in a way that blocks the lower left corner of the device. Apple’s reaction to the problem has been typical: “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

People at ZDNET have not been able to replicate the antenna problems that have been reported. In fact, in the first two days of using the iPhone 4 I’ve had a shocking discovery: It is giving them far better bandwidth on the AT&T 3G network.

I started noticing this on Thursday after they picked up the iPhone 4. The first bandwidth speed tests that we ran showed that we were getting much higher bandwidth numbers then I was used to seeing on AT&T. I was getting over 2 Mbps on downloads and over 700K on uploads. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, because it was only a little higher than normal. In my 3G bandwidth tests on various devices in different cities across the U.S., the 3G speeds tend to top out at about 1.0-1.5 Mbps down and 250-500 Kbps up.

However, the increase was enough to pique my interest and so we ran a bunch of additional speed tests. The results were startling. In several spots we were able to get upwards of 4.0 Mbps down and 1.0 Mbps up.

We wondered if AT&T had done a network upgrade to coincide with the iPhone 4 launch. 

To verify whether this was just a general AT&T upgrade or if there was something going on with the iPhone 4, we had one of my friends who has an iPhone 3G come into my office so that we could both run the same speed tests and compare the results.

We used the two most common iPhone speed test apps, the one from Speedtest.net and the one from Xtreme Labs. I had him start his test and then I started mine. In both cases, the iPhone 4 blew away the iPhone 3G. Take a look at the results below:

Speedtest.net

Xtreme Labs

So Apple wassup?