Tech Shout!

Apparently a few Apple iPhones have ended up knocking out extensive sections of Duke University campus’ Wi-Fi network. Now what’s most amusing is that the network officials haven’t been able to figure out a reason behind the same.

According to Network World.com’s John Cox, twice, i.e. once on last Friday, and the second time was yesterday, when around two iPhones ended up flooding campus routers from IP address requests, crushing up to 30 of them at once and putting them out of commission for as long as 10 to 15 minutes.

Whilst speaking about this issue, Kevin Miller of Duke’s Office of Information Technology told NetworkWorld that it’s really a thing to wait and watch as to how many students come back with their iPhone devices when they return in August.

Duke, which has as many as 13,000 students during the course of year, at present already has 150 iPhones registered at the institution. Dozens of Wi-Fi hotspots are scattered around the three main campuses — West, East and Central — in Durham, N.C.

When Wi-Fi access points began issuing the equivalent of busy signals, Duke’s network staff detected the problem to misbehaving iPhones that were flooding the routers with bogus Internet address requests - at the rate of up to 18,000 per second, which is approx. 10Mbps in bandwidth.

Though Miller can’t exactly point out to the exact reason causing the problem, he does have an iota of a suspect on the highly aggressive way the iPhone deals with dropped Wi-Fi signals. “It may have something to do with the iPhone losing connectivity and then trying to reconnect in a new location,” Miller maintains.

The problem could also be thanks 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.”

Though a maximum of the university Wi-Fi network runs on Cisco routers, Miller mentioned that he has his doubts that the problem is connected to Cisco “in any way, shape or form.”

Apple has not yet come ahead and passed any significant statement regarding the problem or spoken about any measures it plans to take to tackle it. But one thing that’s truly intriguing is that why is this problem only in Duke. If the problem lies in Apple’s devices then a string of other places should be complaining about the same.