The iPhone 3G is faster than most people thought. In a chat with Apple's Greg Joswiak today, we confirmed that the new iPhone uses the HSDPA 3.6 high-speed network standard, which is faster than the HSDPA 1.8 standard previously reported.

HSDPA 3.6 is the fastest that AT&T's HSDPA network can go right now, although some countries have an even faster HSDPA 7.2 up and running. The "3.6" refers to the theoretical top speed in megabits per second.

In our tests, HSDPA 3.6 has delivered average speeds around 1.1 mbits/sec, a big rise over the previous 600 kbits/sec of HSDPA 1.8. HSDPA 3.6 is also about on par with Verizon's and Sprint's EVDO Rev A networks, in real life conditions.

We're still not sure if the iPhone has HSUPA, which has sped up uploads from 384 kbps to up to 835 kbps in our past tests. We'll find that out when we test the iPhone.