If you happen to be currently struggling with the slow EDGE network speeds, then you'll be happy to know that the FCC has given the go ahead for AT&T to purchase 12 MHZ of a 700-MHZ spectrum from Aloha Partners - a deal which will cost AT&T $2.5 billion.

Basically what this means is that with this new allocation AT&T will have the option to use UMTS/HSUPA, a far faster alternative to EDGE.

To compare, EDGE is limited to a rate of just 50 to 110 kilobytes per second, wheras HSUPA can achieve download speeds of some 3 MBPS (megabytes per second), with upload speeds hitting 1.5 MBPS - a whopping 3000% speed increase over EDGE.

[via Information Week]