Duke Wi-Fi Crippled by Apple iPhones

One of the big selling points of Apple's iPhone is the ability to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, but I.T. pros at Duke University might say otherwise. The iPhones on campus are flooding the school's wireless LAN with as many as 18,000 access requests per second, temporarily knocking out access points for 10 to 15 minutes at a time, according to Kevin Miller, Duke's assistant director of communications infrastructure.

The iPhones are requesting a router address that's not valid on Duke's network. When there's no answer, the iPhones keep asking, a process that essentially amounts to a distributed denial-of-service attack, knocking out access points and keeping Duke's I.T. staff scrambling.

In year 2000, we had the Slashdot effect. In 2007, we have the iPhone effect.

I hope this is not going to be an attack on Apple and iPhones or turn into one.

I hope not! Whereas the /. effect is typically short lived, the iPhone effect won't be.

Mostly the /. effect is an accepted condition with minimal carping from "outsiders". A story gets posted on /. and 10,000 computers hit the subject website. Any site without the bandwidth and/or server capacity to handle the onslaught gets hosed (a techincal term, that). The regular sites - New York Times, Information Week, et al - today have the ability to deal with the /. effect. Those sites that are not under the regular scrutiny of /. really have what amounts to a DDoS attack. It *isn't* that, but it acts like that. /.ers regularly mirror the subject webpage. IP issues notwithstanding, it's tolerated.

My guess is that situations like Duke may happen, but economics being what they are, they'll be solved without much fanfare. I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think it will be okay. Still, I'd watch it.

Regardless, it's a good point dtravis7!

Duke exonerates iPhone from network outage charges

Cisco access point at fault for Duke's wireless issues

kaidomac said:

Duke exonerates iPhone from network outage charges

Cisco access point at fault for Duke's wireless issues

Click to expand...

Now, will the news that Cisco was actually to blame make the tech pages on CNN, Business 2.0, and ZDNet? I mean, they carried the false story, surely they'll be interested in correcting themselves.

Right?

I'll be darned!!!

iPhone not to blame for Duke outage. Took 'em 24 hours but they finally published it!