AT&T To Formally Launch MMS on iPhone

The time has come for AT&T to finally announce the feature that a lot of iPhone owners have been waiting for month. Apple did promise iPhonians that MMS would be supported in iPhone 3.0. But AT&T has delayed the process for a while now. The company has cited nervousness among other reasons for the delay. But the wait is finally over, and we are finally going to get a chance to try MMS on iPhone. AT&T provided a further update on the whole process, which now requires iPhone owners to download a software update through iTunes, through its Facebook page:

September 25 for iPhone 3G and 3GS customers. MMS will be enabled through a software update on that day….We know that iPhone users will embrace MMS. 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. We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end.

A few iPhone owners were lucky to get a chance to try the feature a few days earlier, and there doesn’t seem to be a major problem as far as the service is concerned but sources have pointed out that AT&T is still nervous about how it will all go down. The main concern seems to be the load at this point. Since MMS allows iPhone owners to share videos, audio files, and other multimedia files via SMS. So the first few hours could be really hectic as iPhone holders test the service out. But will it all be enough to crash AT&T networks? It seems analysts are divided on that.

AT&T seems to have some concerns about the load that iPhone owners will put on its network right after the launch. A few experts argue that the load shouldn’t be anything that AT&T networks can’t handle, especially since iPhone owners consume a huge amount of network resources by watching videos, browsing on the Internet and doing all kinds of things on their phones. One way or another, we are going to find out what AT&T is made of today. Will MMS catch fire among the majority of iPhone owners? That’s something we will have to wait and see.

Your take: please share your iPhone MMS issues here.