AT&T announced today it will be launching Multimedia Messaging Service or MMS to the iPhone on September 25, 2009.

The long awaited update to the iPhone, since its announcement of the 3.0 firmware back in May, was to bring MMS to the iPhone. Most carriers immediately supported MMS, however AT&T stated it would not be supporting it in June with the rest of the carriers. AT&T said it planned to launch the service by the end of summer.

AT&T said the reason for not launching the MMS service in June was to see if their network could handle the increase in traffic. The last couple of months, AT&T has been upgrading their network to handle the increase in traffic once MMS goes live, saying there will be an "exponentially increase traffic."

AT&T did mention that the MMS will be enabled through a software update. This update is said to launch on September 25, 2009 and could be just for AT&T customers or the anticipated release of the iPhone 3.1 firmware that has been in beta for some time.

There is still no set date on when tethering will be launched, although the company has said it will be available "in the future."