Every time AT&T sends out a press release or makes a new advertisement they make the rather bold claim of having the 'fastest 3G network' in the world. The fact that their customers have sued them over the falsehood of this claim has done nothing to stop AT&T from shouting it to anyone who will listen. While I doubt the communication's powerhouse will ever admit that their claims are, at best, exaggerated, at least they're working to fix their network.

HSDPA is coming to AT&T, which means that their customers can look forward to seeing download speeds of up to 7.2Mbps. High speed packet access is a major upgrade that will bring AT&T's network close to 4G speeds way ahead of any of their competitors. This is good news for ATT customers, and for Apple fanatics.

The first HSDPA enabled smartphones and laptops are promised “later this year”, which probably means mid-summer at the earliest. It's possible that the iPhone 2009 will be the very first ATT smartphone to benefit from the HSDPA upgrade. That's good news; it means that the brand new iPhone might actually have Internet speed on par with its processing capability. Of course, this is AT&T we're talking about here. If anyone can screw up cutting-edge technology, it's them.

I can't imagine Verizon or T-Mobile is going to take this one-upping lying down. With any luck, this is just the first major wave of HSDPA upgrades we'll see this year.