Forget the reception issue, Give me consistent speed with 3G Data!!

I can live with the reception issue (I can make calls at 1 bar or 5 bars).(Not intended to make light of those that are having serious dropped call/reception issues.) But the inconsistency of fast 3G downloads to crawling or inability to download data is driving me nuts. AT&T claims there is no issue with our local network and blames it on hardware (hard to dispute when a 3Gs setting next to the iPhone 4 is 10 times faster at loading a page). But Apple says the iPhone checks out just fine and you "know how AT&T service can be". Some people have switched out sim cards or even had phones replaced, and continue to have poor 3G performance. For me, 3G performance seems to always be excellent in the morning, and then slowly degrades throughout the day. Which adds credence to it being an AT&T problem, but then why does the iPhone 3Gs not exhibit the same behavior under the exact set of circumstances.

I just wish I could get a straight answer from someone. If it is a poor baseband on the new phones, let us know you are working on a fix (of course that will never happen). If it is AT&Ts network just getting slammed as the day progresses, then are you doing things to expand capacity? Why can't companies these days just except responsibility and then move forward with improvements so that us consumers can stop all this back and forth troubleshooting?