The long wait is almost over, and it looks like AT&T won’t be making good on their promise to iPhone customers regarding the rollout of MMS support. Originally it was supposed to launch in late summer. Well guess what – September 25th is three days into fall. There have already been a number of lawsuits regarding the service delay.

It sucks to be getting excited about this so late in the game, but still, I’m excited. I’m not a big MMS user, but strangely enough my dad is, so I can finally get those on my phone. It’s also nice that the service will work just like an SMS – no additional fees apply.

There’s still no word on tethering, though. “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,” an AT&T spokesperson told Gizmodo. It’s statements like this one that truly infuriate me. I know AT&T is just trying to protect its corporate image, but it needs to acknowledge the fact that its service sucks for a whole lot of people, not spout off about delivering that great service customers expect. Of course we expect it. You, AT&T, rarely deliver.

At any rate, have some fun on the 25th. You’ll be able to get access to the service via a software update for the phone. I’m sure MMS will take all of 12 minutes to bring AT&T’s network to its knees.

The only way I can think of AT&T making the wait for MMS worse would be charging customers extra for the service when it finally goes live. Luckily, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be doing that…to everyone.

In the AT&T iPhone 3GS FAQ PDF the company states in plain language that MMS is coming soon “at no extra cost to customers with a text messaging bundle.”

That plain language leaves some room for interpretation, though. AT&T says they won’t charge you extra for the service, as in no extra fee for sending the messages. But how will they count against your SMS bundle count? If, say, you have the 200 messages plan, which costs $5 under AT&T, will each MMS count as one message, or will they dock your total more for sending videos of your son barfing on the dog?

For now I’ll hope they don’t turn their MMS policy into a “credit” system, whereby they can alter how many credits you get charged per message. We already know that texting plans are a racket. Going to credits could send furious texters into a frenzy.