Is an EDGE speed bump the iPhone's "one more thing?"

If the iPhone has an Achilles' heel, I'd say it's the sluggish performance of AT&T's "2.5G" EDGE wireless data network, which (while gentle on battery life) is substantially slower in real-world use than the competitive EVDO/CDMA technology from Sprint and Verizon, not to mention AT&T's own lightly-deployed HSDPA network... but has EDGE really been performing at top speed?

Those millions of dollars of network infrastructure improvements leading to "Touch Friday" must be doing something, and according to Engadget and the HowardForums & MacRumors boards, those dollars may have been put towards a bundle of enhancements called "Fine EDGE." Maybe it's a group hallucination, maybe a temporary anti-glitch, but forum posters are reporting dramatically better EDGE speeds than they were getting just days earlier — around 200kbits/sec, edging up close to the maximum speeds allowed by the protocol and in some cases double the performance they were accustomed to seeing.

Is this the iPhone Halo effect at work? Or just a coincidence, a measurement error, an illusion? We'll find out more over the weekend.