iPhone - Now with MMS from 2002!

AT&T has just announced that MMS — a much-ballyhooed feature of iPhone OS 3.0 — will finally be hitting AT&T on September 25. There’s still no date for tethering, though the company is holding the line that it’ll be offered “in the future.” Expanding on the logic behind the tethering delay, they’re saying that “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.”

We’re no network engineers, but “exponentially increase traffic” and “AT&T” are two things we don’t typically like to hear in the same sentence — let’s hope the 850MHz, 7.2Mbps, and backhaul upgrades they’re cranking on right now go a long way toward sorting that out. As for MMS, they’re acknowledging that the release “does indeed fall a few days past the official end of summer,” arguing that their support of more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world made a positive launch experience a bit of a challenge.

Of course, virtually every other phone AT&T sells (and has sold for the past several years) supports the same tech, so this feels like a pretty active admission that iPhone users blaze through data-rich features at a pace that the carrier has been ill-equipped to handle.

A class action started in a Louisana district court alleging that Apple and AT&T touted the iPhone as supporting MMS (multimedia messaging service) but have not as yet provided the service.

The plaintiffs allege that Apple “advertised heavily that the new version of iPhone, the 3G, as well as the even newer version the 3G-S would allow MMS. Apple’s print and video advertisements in and on television, the internet, the radio, newspapers and direct mailers all touted the availability of MMS.” AT&T advertised the same functionality, the filing says.

But since the launch, in the USA, such functionality is not yet available. The court filing says the AT&T Answer Center page said: “Customers who are sent a MMS message and own a non-MMS capable device will receive a text message instead of an actual MMS message.”

But, the filing alleges: “AT&T is not a carrier which offers MMS! Of course, AT&T is the only carrier in the United States used by the iPhone. In other words, AT&T’s towers do not support MMS.”

Apple, says the filings, has revealed that AT&T has never upgraded its towers so as to support MMS functionality. “The only excuse offered by AT&T and Apple is a mouseprint disclaimer on the website, in barely readable font, which reads ‘MMS Support from AT&T coming in late summer’”.

The class action suit alleges the Louisana suit will consist of at least 10,000 individuals. The action is brought both under the Louisiana Unfair Trade Practices Act and other Louisiana civil codes.

Without citing a source (not even an anonymous one), blog AppModo claims AT&T will be delaying multimedia-messaging support for iPhone customers until September. The blog also echoes a rumor that a tethering plan will cost an extra $55 per month for iPhone customers. AT&T has denied both these claims.

In an e-mail to Wired.com, an AT&T spokesman said the company will charge for a tethering plan but still has not determined how much it will cost or when it will become available. AT&T also maintains that MMS support will be available “later this summer,” as the company stated in previous reports.

Then again, this statement doesn’t completely squash the MMS rumor. Early September is still considered late summer, so if MMS doesn’t arrive until then, AT&T will not have broken its promise.

Tethering, on the other hand — we’re skeptical that it would cost quite that much for iPhone customers: We would expect tethering to be priced similarly to other tethering plans for AT&T smartphones. If you look at AT&T’s data plan web site, you’ll see that tethering is lumped into an overall data plan for BlackBerry, for example. The BlackBerry’s data plan is $45 without tethering; add on tethering and the data plan costs $60. So that would mean tethering costs an additional $15 for the BlackBerry. We would expect the iPhone’s tethering to cost about the same, if it hopes to attract any customers.

via Wired.com.