Well “late summer” has come and gone and nearly half a day into the promised launch date of MMS for all AT&T iPhone customers, it finally arrived a little before noon Pacific time. With Twitter a flame with tweets to slam the network at 5 pm Eastern with MMS use, one thing is certain about todays MMS release: Apple is watching.

Apple formally introduced Multimedia Messaging Service to the world in early June at its iPhone OS 3.0 dog and pony show. It displayed it before the developers in a nice large screen with all the carriers that would support MMS upon the June 28th release. Of course, it paused for everyone to take in the fact that the Death Star AT&T logo was missing from the slide at Moscone Centers stage. Front and center, not.

After a furry of angry tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts around the Interwebs, AT&T months later sent Seth, its PR guy, to explain the absence via video. See, the thing was, iPhone users were just so unlike other smartphone customers with their data use that AT&T couldn’t possibly support MMS so soon. Soon? Really, MMS support was a surprise to AT&T the day of announcement? Hard to believe but even so, it begs the question why hadn’t it built out the network PRIOR to the announcement when it had to know it was eventually coming? Well, Mr. ATT went on to tell viewers that Ma Bell was fixing a hole for the benefit of iPhone users and would be taking care of signal issues, as well, during the summer. Bonus! Seth really worked it in the video showing lots of towers, data, and hope. Yes, hope you can believe in.

Well, here we are, finally MMS is working and running for iPhone users nationwide and all eyes are on AT&T. How will it handle this? Rumors on Twitter early Tuesday, just days before roll-out, was that a preliminary stress test crashed the system. Today will be a test like none other for AT&T and if it fails, well, it’s almost a sure bet that Verizon will reap success from AT&Ts failure. With Seth’s assurance that iPhone users would enjoy the experience and the billions of dollars it poured into upgrades, failure will only mean that AT&T will never ever be able to fix its holes. Apple will use that as reasoning why it just is no longer “happy” with its relationship and will tell AT&T that it wants to see other people. Of course, it’ll still be friends with AT&T, just not exclusive friends.

So, AT&T, today you must shine or it is over. No marketing blitz will save you from the woes of Apple taking a trip to Jersey and welcoming that guy with his glasses and large group of friends to the iPhone family. As they say in Jersey, put up or shut up.

UPDATE: Upon my first MMS test, it took nearly a minute to complete the send of the MMS message to my wife’s iPhone. Here’s the great part. At five bars in a 3G area, it took nearly 10 minutes for her to receive the MMS message. 10 minutes! While I know everyone with an iPhone is probably using the system right now, man, 10 minutes is S-A-D. I could have described the picture to her via SMS in that amount of time. Shesh…

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