• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 4, 2009

The same day the New York Times ran a prominent story highlighting AT&T's problems handling surging network demand from the iPhone, the carrier announced it would finally launch multimedia messaging services for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S on September 25. MMS allows users to send messages including photos, video, audio and other content.

The step comes six months after Apple initially confirmed its OS 3.0 update for the iPhone would include MMS support and three months after the new software and 3G S were released. "The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone's multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One," explained AT&T in its mea culpa.

It also sort of concedes it's been overwhelmed by the iPhone-driven data usage. "Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350% year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry."

Even so, gadget pundits were complaining that AT&T still has delivered on promised support for tethering so iPhones can be connected to other devices via Bluetooth or a UBS connection. The carrier had an answer for the tethering delay too:

"By its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect." (Translate as: "Are you freaking kidding, we can barely keep this thing up and running with the iPhone sucking up bandwidth as it is!")

Perhaps another Times story about AT&T's overloaded network ricocheting around the Web would speed things up a bit.