iPhones Suspected in Duke WiFi Crash

Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone may be the hottest gadget to fly off store shelves in recent history, but for the IT department at Duke University , the innovative mobile phones could be the reason for the wireless network disruptions plaguing the campus.

The problem, according to published reports, is the phone's built-in 802.11b/g adapters, which have been intermittently inundating the school's pervasive wireless local access network (WLAN) with media access control (MAC) address requests.

"It's kind of like an earthquake you can't even feel unless you're near the epicenter," Bill Cannon, a Duke University spokesperson, told MacNewsWorld. "Our engineers noticed the problem and followed the trail, which led to iPhone users [on campus]."

About 150 iPhones are registered on the Duke network.

Hotspots No More

Duke's issues began last Friday, when administrators noticed anywhere between 12 and 30 wireless access points had gone down. The disruption lasted for about 10 minutes, Cannon said. The incidents occurred a total of nine times, with the last one taking place Tuesday afternoon.

Although university administrators have not been able to identify the exact cause of the problem, they are working with Apple and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) , provider of the school's WLAN system, to see where the problem lies, Cannon explained.

However, one explanation surrounds the iPhone's wireless connectivity. The phones may have been programmed to continually seek access to the Internet via wireless network access points. As the phone's user moves from one hotspot to another, the phone could flood the access points with thousands of requests per second for a router address that is invalid on Duke's network.

The school has contacted other universities to learn if they have experienced similar problems, but thus far there have not been any additional reports of issues elsewhere. Neither Cisco nor Apple responded to requests for comments.

Fallacious Reasoning?

This appears to be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc -- after the fact, therefore because of the fact -- David Chamberlain, a principal analyst at InStat, told MacNewsWorld.

"How [could] those [150 iPhones] overwhelm a network when there are probably hundreds of students downloading pirated movies from BitTorrent every night?" he said. "Just because iPhones were added recently does not mean they were responsible for the network problems. It's just something that coincidentally happened a short time before the network troubles."

The phone may be causing IT administrators some network problems, John Barrett, a Parks Associate analyst, told MacNewsWorld, but this will not prevent students and other consumers from purchasing an iPhone.

"They'll scramble around and find a way to solve this, but I don't think this will impact sales at all," he commented. "I don't think there's a kid on the Duke campus [who] would say no to an iPhone despite what it may do to the university's network."