iPhone taking down Duke infrastructure

Something strange is afoot in Durham, North Carolina. The wireless network of Duke University has been having issues in the past few days, with routers being barraged by repeated requests for IP addresses—up to 18,000 per second. And that problem has been laid squarely at the feet of iPhones on campus.

Capture of network packets revealed that the iPhones appeared to be the culprit, with, in some cases as few as two of them making enough requests to take routers offline for ten or fifteen minutes.

The oddity of this circumstance is its uniqueness. By this point, there are tens of thousands of iPhones around the country, and no other institution has reported the same issue. Is it something particular to Duke’s setup, or is it just an extremely rare problem that happened to crop up there?

Duke’s network team has reported the issue to Apple, who’s apparently busy investigating, though they have not yet responded to the query. If I might be so bold to suggest, perhaps they should seek the culprits to the southwest.

Category: News, Wi-Fi

Posted by Dan Moren on Jul 17 2007, 3:14 PM ET

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