MacRumors (and various other blogs) now are reporting that AT&T is planning to support Skype, Google Voice, and other voice related software on their network, something they previously hinted they would never do.

A quote from the original article in the Washington Post:

“One source close to the thinking of AT&T executives said the company has been deliberating the decision for weeks and that top executives have said they were close to accepting voice over Internet services on all AT&T

phones, including the iPhone. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because a decision hadn’t been officially announced. Skype currently operates on the iPhone through WiFi access, but not on AT&T’s 3G mobile network.”

Apple had been reported to have rejected Google Voice from being in its App Store, which (as you may have read) caused a firestorm of “he said, she said” to occur in the iPhone universe. Nonetheless, smart move by AT&T to allow the services on their network.

AT&T has confirmed that multimedia messaging capabilities will come to the iPhone a few days late, on Sept. 25 — just after the end of summer — bringing to an end months of waiting and speculation.

The service will be available with a software update on the launch date. The update will arrive for customers as a download from iTunes. The feature will only be available for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS users.

“It was important to give our customers a positive experience from day one,” AT&T said. “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. We truly appreciate our customers’ patience and hope they’ll understand our desire to get it right from the start.”

AT&T officials said they have been working for months to prepare their systems and network for MMS capabilities on the iPhone, which is expected to bring a great deal of additional bandwidth the the wireless provider’s network. Officials have admitted that the additional bandwidth consumed by iPhone users has been taxing on their data infrastructure, thus the delay in MMS support.

Many have said that the process Apple uses to approve and disapprove apps for its App Store seems arbitrary. When Apple denies apps developers often get nothing more than a cryptic explanation of why the app was denied.

The latest app to get the denial treatment from Apple was the Google voice app. InformationWeek reports that the FCC sent letters Friday to both Apple and AT&T seeking more information on how apps are approved and disapproved. AT&T says it has no bearing over the approval of apps on the App Store. Apple has said that it disapproves apps that duplicate functionality already available on the device like browsers and music player apps. You would think if Microsoft can’t exclude browsers from its computers that the same would apply to Apple and its smartphones. Perhaps the FCC can get to the bottom of the story.

According to a recent discovery by Macworld, the iPhone 3GS, despite its faster download speeds will still be limited to 384 Kbps on the upstream side. This discovery came by way of the recent RapidRepair teardown which highlighted that Apple used a UMTS/HSDPA chip.
“UMTS is the earliest 3G standard deployed on GSM networks, and it tops out at 384 Kbps.”
Interestingly, this is one time that a faster upload time may have been a little nicer to see. For example, on a home connection the upstream speed, while important, is not always going to be fully taken advantage of.

However in the case of the iPhone 3GS, this seems to be a pretty big disappointment, especially when many users will be uploading video directly from their phone.
That said, on the positive side, the downstream speed has been confirmed as (potentially) being faster. I say potentially because although the iPhone 3GS is capable of reaching 7.2 Mbps down, the AT&T network is still not capable of offering that just yet.

Of course, all things considered even speeds of 384 Kbps is decent on a mobile device, but still, I cannot help but feel that it would have been nicer to see the upstream seeing speeds up to either 1.4 or 1.9 Mbps.
That said, according to my most recent test (as pictured), my upstream speed over what I would call a reliable 3G connection is 245 Kbps or 0.24 Mbps.