Apple really did good by us when they decided to integrate WiFi into the iPhone. But, we have a feeling that Duke University’s Office of Information Technology doesn’t share our sentiment. Network World‘s John Cox blames the campus’s fleet of iPhones for intermittently knocking up to 30 wireless access points offline.
Apparently, iPhones on campus are flooding the university’s expansive wireless LAN with MAC address requests – amounting to 18,000 IP addresses per second (about 10Mbps in bandwidth). Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke’s Office of Information Technology, says that inundated system becomes unresponsive and access points show up as “out of service” for 10-15 minutes at a time – leaving the IT team unable to communicate with the wireless access points.
Miller states that, “Because of the time of year for us, it’s not a severe problem. But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones?”
The problem may be attributed to a design flaw. Miller said that the iPhones “use the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) to request the MAC address of the destination node, for which it already has the IP address. When it doesn’t get an answer, the iPhone just keeps asking.”
College students are among the prime demographic targets for the iPhone, so if this issue doesn’t get resolved before the academic year commences, Duke could have a huge problem on its hands. We may even see similar issues start to crop up at universities accross the nation with campus-wide wireless LANs – any college worth its salt should have one.
If you’re college is having problems with it’s WiFi network, let us know! We’d love to hear from you, especially if you are having problems connecting with your iPhone.
[Via: Apple Insider]