Reports are showing up all over the web today that iPhone MMS has been activated seemingly at random for many users. September 25th is supposed to be the official launch date, but users from locations as saturated as Manhattan and as far-flung as Iowa have reported MMS support on a variety of carrier and OS configurations.

This isn’t exactly a surprise. One of AT&T’s major concerns with MMS activation for a phone that has become the most popular camera on Flickr is network load. A slow and steady roll-out is basically a silent beta test – a way for users to get an experience they’ve been waiting for earlier than expected and give AT&T the network feedback they need. If this hadn’t been such a long time coming, I’d be inclined to say the carrier did something right.

AT&T knows you aren’t happy with your iPhone service. It’s making videos to try to explain away some of your woes, but the company may also be looking to add new iPhone-exclusive features to improve the user experience.

According to a story at Apple Insider, Apple and AT&T are looking into a software update that would add features to improve customer satisfaction. Among the rumored list of features are overage alerts, which would offer push notifications if you’re past your text limit, for instance. There’s also the potential for a “Voicemail” tab in the settings app, allowing you to disable the custom voicemail greetings on your own phone and bypass those greetings when you call other AT&T subscribers.

From what we know so far, this plan is a joke. The phone is fine. These features might be nice additions, but as almost every single survey has shown, iPhone owners love the phone and loathe AT&T. Adding these features to the phone will just exacerbate that issue. Sure, callers can get to my voicemail faster, but if I can’t listen to their messages what does it matter?

I don’t need features to improve my experience, I need more reliable service. When AT&T stops wasting time and money on gimmicks like this and allocates those resources to network improvement the average iPhone user experience will improve.

“Look we see the discussions on the web,” says Seth Bloom. He’s also known as “Seth the blogger guy,” and he’s featured in a new video by AT&T. The video attempts to describe the MMS delay we’ve experienced and explain away our complaints with talk of network traffic and increased smartphone use.

The video, which you can see below, is just flat out insulting. It seems to suggest that AT&T’s service sucks by no fault of their own, and that maybe if you just took the time to understand a cellular network you would realize that fact. I’ll grant AT&T the fact that the iPhone probably would have crippled any network, but the responsibility would still lie with the carrier. It’s time to stop pretending AT&T isn’t making billions of dollars by not providing the service millions of people signed contracts for.

If anything, Seth should be decrying American carrier exclusivity contracts or the ridiculously low standards to which our wireless carriers are held. But Seth won’t do that, because he’s only here to humanize AT&T, to explain away our woes, and to get us to really feel for a company that can’t provide what consumers are paying for.

The worst part of this video is that people are going to gobble up this bullshit and regurgitate it to all of their friends. Even reputable news sources, sources that should know better, are blaming the iPhone for strangling AT&T networks, like AT&T just watched as Apple muscled its way onto the carrier’s network and starting eating up bandwidth. Let’s not forget, people, that AT&T helped orchestrate this thing. The fact that they weren’t and still aren’t prepared to handle the network load is no one’s fault but their own.

Every time I read an article lauding the giant sums wireless carriers spend to upgrade their networks I want to vomit. These companies aren’t dying. They aren’t struggling. A lot of them are growing as much as 5% year over year in the face a recession. That’s not exactly the profile of a company I can feel sorry for.

As consumers we need to stop believing this trash. Stop listening when AT&T says it’s “working on it,” and instead continue to write letters. Continue to lodge complaints. Hell, continue filling lawsuits for breach of contract on the part of AT&T. Videos like this are doing nothing more than telling you to accept shit service lying down because there’s nothing to be done about it. There is, we just aren’t loud enough to make AT&T pay for it yet.