Just as people were starting to notice that AT&T was getting very close to their end of summer deadline for offering MMS functionality on the iPhone, AT&T e-mails us to note they'll be launching the feature on September 25. That's technically three days late, but we're sure you'll let it slide.

"It was important to give our customers a positive experience from day one," AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom tells us. "We support more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world so we took the time necessary to make sure our network is ready to handle what we expect will be a record volume of MMS traffic," the company says.

At launch, 29 global carriers not named AT&T were ready to support MMS, but AT&T was a no show, likely because of the systems integration issues posed by their acquisition of BellSouth. Back in June, AT&T told us the delays were due to a "systems issue," and not a network capacity issue. Their statement would now seem to indicate it was both a network and systems issue.

AT&T took a beating for being late, and the company has been sued twice by customers complaining that Apple and AT&T promoted the capability in press reports, TV spots and on their website -- but failed to deliver the goods. AT&T has consistently stated that MMS support would drop, to quote a certain Don Henley, before the boys of summer had gone.

According to AT&T, the functionality will be available via an iTunes update when it drops later this month. Next up? Waiting for iPhone tethering functionality. That may be a longer wait, given the congestion issues many customers still face in a number of markets, despite AT&T's continued assurances they're upgrading backhaul and tower capacity as quickly as possible.