Can AT&T Pull Off a Smooth iPhone MMS Rollout?

By  |  Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 11:12 am

att_header_logoWe are now less than a day away from the start of the long-awaited rollout of MMS on the iPhone. AT&T is planning to roll out the functionality in bunches starting at 10am ET, with a text message being sent to iPhone customers when the account is enabled for MMS, according to an anonymous source quoted by Broadband Reports.

The question now is, given AT&T’s history, will this rollout go off without a hitch? It’s questionable. During tests, the carrier’s MMS servers reportedly failed for those invited to participate. Additionally, in the test groups, “record traffic” was reportedly seen during peak hours. If the situation is as reported, it seems to suggest that Friday could be another one of those days for the carrier’s millions of iPhone users.

If traffic is 40 percent higher than normal as some are predicting on Friday,the grief that iPhone users may experience could bleed to non-iPhone users, further damaging the company’s already weak standing for service reliability with a good chunk of its customers.

Certainly, it’s going to be interesting to watch how AT&T’s network does in the first days of the rollout. Since users will have to connect to iTunes to sync the new “carrier file” which enables the functionality within the iPhone’s software, it’s fairly likely we won’t see any potential problems crop up until later in the day or on Saturday.

Sorry AT&T, but I’m not holding my breath here that you guys can do this. Too many times since I’ve switched to you folks in October for the iPhone 3G you’ve let me down. I never thought I would actually want to go back to T-Mobile and EDGE data (yep, that’s all they have here), but at least they weren’t dropping calls.

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. Eyhk Says:

    Just the fact that they didn’t let us use a standard feature for so long will probably guarantee the fact that everybody who updates will be sending MMS like crazy just for the heck of it, creating a huge spike of useage and probably spiraling AT&T to it’s well deserved demise. Stop handing off our pricey monthly subscriptions to your executives and start re-investing in your infrastructure.

  2. Colin Says:

    Of the three MMS messages I tried to send today, one failed, then didn’t go through on the re-send. One was fine. One failed once and appears to be failing on the resend.

    I think the answer is “No”. AT&T can’t manage a smooth MMS rollout.

  3. Elliot Says:

    I held this opinion too – I was expecting the network to come down immediately once they started opening up MMS. But, here it is 5PM on Friday, I’ve had MMS for 6 hours and the network has been just great! I think I’ve received about 10 MMSes today.

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