AT&T confirms tethering is, “a matter of when and not if,” but the when is farther away than most of us would like.

As for tethering, by its nature, 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. We expect to offer tethering in the future.

While the iPhone has blown the doors off AT&T’s network capabilities, I don’t agree that tethering by an existing customer will exponentially increase traffic. The increased load from the iPhone has been due to mobile browsing and uploading of photos and videos.

Those who plug the iPhone in to a laptop are not significantly increasing consumed bandwidth (unless you’re watching Hulu?), and the number of users who tether will be far fewer than the number of iPhone-only users.

I could agree with the assumption of exponential increase based on an influx of customers from Sprint and Verizon. Those customers could migrate purely to acquire the world’s fastest VPN enabled USB modem (yes, the iPhone effectively becomes a wicked fast USB modem when plugged in – and faster/better than the USB versions available at Sprint and Verizon).

We don’t need a full blown Google Voice application on the iPhone. A simple web app would do. In fact, it would probably be better for overall adoption because only a small percentage of people update their apps religiously.

Given Google’s API for GV, and the speed at which the native apps were developed, this isn’t a stretch. A couple decent web developers could get this launched by Monday… In time to save Arrington and the world from an unnecessary rant on the failings of Android.