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According to a recent discovery by Macworld, the iPhone 3GS, despite its faster download speeds will still be limited to 384 Kbps on the upstream side. This discovery came by way of the recent RapidRepair teardown which highlighted that Apple used a UMTS/HSDPA chip.

“UMTS is the earliest 3G standard deployed on GSM networks, and it tops out at 384 Kbps.”

Interestingly, this is one time that a faster upload time may have been a little nicer to see. For example, on a home connection the upstream speed, while important, is not always going to be fully taken advantage of. However in the case of the iPhone 3GS, this seems to be a pretty big disappointment, especially when many users will be uploading video directly from their phone.

That said, on the positive side, the downstream speed has been confirmed as (potentially) being faster. I say potentially because although the iPhone 3GS is capable of reaching 7.2 Mbps down, the AT&T network is still not capable of offering that just yet.

Of course, all things considered even speeds of 384 Kbps is decent on a mobile device, but still, I cannot help but feel that it would have been nicer to see the upstream seeing speeds up to either 1.4 or 1.9 Mbps.

That said, according to my most recent test (as pictured), my upstream speed over what I would call a reliable 3G connection is 245 Kbps or 0.24 Mbps.

[Macworld]