or is it a function of reception

Unless you're struggling in terms of signal level (i.e. 0-2 bars), it's generally more an issue of congestion / sufficient infrastructure in your area. Some places have low latency and heaps of bandwidth available - at other places (e.g. near Yeronga train station in Bris) you'll have full 'bars' but will be waiting ages just to open a webpage due to high latency and low speed which is generally a congestion issue.

Its acting as a USB modem (personal hotspot or whatever dumb name it has in ios). So its meant to be using the phones 3G I assume.

Its on 3-4 bars which I guessed would explain latency but I thought it would still download much faster.

Yeah that's rubbish, qmass. Sounds like infrastructure/demand problem though as parabol pointed out. Not much you can do most likely. Unusual for Telstra though, which is usually considered a premium service. Where are you located?

on my 3gs i tether and get anywhere from 100k/sec - 300k/sec. it does fluctuate a lot. On my first month i got a bonus of a few gig and thought i would try torrenting. worked out pretty well!

in mount gravatt/carindale area.

did you buy your iphone from telstra?

that might be in part some of the issues

Combined GSM/CDMA antenna: Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
(800 850 900 1800 1900 MHz)
Quad-band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA
(800 850 900 1900 2100 MHz) (800 MHz unannounced)
Dual-band CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A (800 1900 MHz)
GLONASS signal reception
GPS signal reception

if your phone isn't 850mhz, then you're not getting next g

(ps, fucking cool it using russian glonass and western GPS, there now be one thing i like about the iphone, just one tho)

Telstra 4g easily competes with most adsl speeds...you pay through the arse for it tho :)
Ex Telstra emplyoee dodgy sales techniques and not a customer focused company that's why i left them.... Back in Helpdesk and loving it...

I know they have done a lot to try and turn around the image but too little too late i reckon they have bleed so much of the mobile market....

Having said that might head back to them cos of the 4g connection speeds alone and you never get a drop out on their network...Thanks to the low frequency you can use the phone in lifts above 20 floors and even in car parks pretty good interesting stuff if you into that....