In the past few hours as readers from northern New England have come online for the morning, the reports have come flooding in: AT&T has finally turned on the 3G upgrade packages installed on its towers from the Portsmouth Traffic Circle/Kittery bridge (Route 95 corridor) to its retail store in Brunswick just off the Route 295 corridor and performance as well as reception are reportedly excellent!

Many readers have been waiting since the day the iPhone 3G shipped for this, and the excitement is palpable.

Although sources at AT&T Corporate have been typically reluctant to promise the higher-end 3G data transfer rates…..early reports from readers and the hands-on experience of our own team at the maine.xerces.com datacenter/offices are very promising.

We are hoping that many more readers from Maine will take the opportunity to run the Speedtest.IPA from the App Store on their iPhone 3G (and even 2.5G EDGE based models to see if there are any differences with their connections now that the 3G radio packages have been turned on at the Route 95/295 towers!), and send the results to us at rumors@macosrumors.com!

We’ll be posting as much of that feedback as we can and help as many of our readers from Maine as possible make the most of their iPhones with this long-awaited 3G connectivity.

Not only have early reports been impressive….they have been downright perfect, with most showing the full ~1.33Mbps expected by this initial rollout and some appearing to register speeds close to the theoretical real-world 3G maximum of 2Mbps!

Considering that some of our most enthusiastic and optimistic sources at AT&T were hesitant to set expectations any higher than 3G’s “long-range roaming average” of 768Kbps with speeds “in town” close to towers or in downtown Portland around 1.3Mbps……this is very good news.

Many readers in areas that are distinctly rural reported speeds well in excess of 1Mbps; several who are more than 10 miles from either highway corridor and near the northern edge of the 3G coverage area have reported close to 2Mbps performance.

We will continue to report on this and the larger 3G rollout in key areas as yet only serviced by EDGE/GPRS….and much more iPhone/iDevice dirt in the days ahead! Stay tuned.