What I don't get about AT&T and iPhone MMS
I’m going to first state that I have no idea how MMS really works on the cell phone provider side of everything. The infrastructure, how it really works, and what’s required is all a mystery to me. But there’s one thing that I do know, AT&T has taken too long to bring it to the iPhone and no one is happy about that.
First lets try to figure out how many iPhones are on AT&T’s network. According to Apple they have sold 21.17 million units as of Q2 2009. (Wikipedia) As everything with Apple there’s no telling exactly where those are sold. Either in the US where we’re stuck with AT&T or internationally. Of course the iPhone has only been available outside of the United States for a few months. Keeping that in mind I’m going to make a very, very rough guess that AT&T has at least 15 million iPhones on their network. According to AT&T’s investor information page they have “78.2 million customers” in the United States. Percentage wise, that’s a good hunk of AT&T customers that have an iPhone.
So right now almost 20% of AT&T’s subscriber base does NOT have MMS. That means AT&T doesn’t currently have that kind of strain on their system. Now if the iPhone never came out and if AT&T had the same kind of subscribers as they do now, MMS would be supported for that 20%. So why are iPhone users being penalized?
When the iPhone first came out it did not support MMS at all. This was not a software limitation but more a “Steve Jobs” limitation. It could have supported MMS but Jobs thought (others and myself assume) that email was just as good as MMS without stressing out a wireless carrier. What AT&T has probably done was turned a blind eye to their MMS infrastructure. Less users that can send MMS probably means that they don’t need to support them. But AT&T had to have known that the iPhone could very well support MMS. I’m sure as shit that Apple and AT&T have had some kind of conversation regarding getting MMS setup on an iPhone to be used with their network well before iPhone 3.0 was a twinkle in Mr. Jobs’ nuts.
Sorry, I got off topic a little there. We all know that AT&T failed to deliver MMS “on time” for the end of summer. What is shady about all of this to me is that AT&T is missing that MMS volume because of the iPhone. Current AT&T subscribers switched over to the iPhone at an alarming rate. This no doubt left a gap in the number of people that could use MMS. What happened to that gap? What happened to the infrastructure that was once used by existing customers that could use MMS previously but then couldn’t when they got an iPhone? That gap is the shady part for me, and makes me wonder why we all couldn’t just have MMS when Jobs said “make it so.”