p2pnet news | WiFi:- In a major marketing promotion triumph for Apple, in 2004 Duke University forked out a lot of money to buy 1,600 iPods for first-year students, later also deciding to use the music player throughout the university to store class materials.

But it seems iPhones aren’t quite as handy.

“Apple Inc.’s flashy new iPhones may be jamming parts of the wireless network at Duke University, where technology officials worked with the company Wednesday to fix problems before classes begin next month,” says Associated Press, going on:

“Bill Cannon, a Duke technology spokesman, said an analysis of traffic found that iPhones flooded parts of the campus’ wireless network with access requests, freezing parts of the system for 10 minutes at a time.

A single iPhone was, “powerful enough to cause the problem, and there are 100 to 150 of them registered on the network,” Cannon said, according to the story, which also says, “Network administrators have noticed the problem nine times in the past week.”

It’s probably not Apple’s fault, says Tanner Godarzi on iPhone Matters, stating:

I suspect that this could due to their configuration or it could be an actual bug in the iPhone but this seems to the first reports of any thing like this. It’s a little hard to believe that the blame can be passed on to Apple so easily when no other reports have surfaced which would prompt others to believe it’s the configuration …

But, “then again it could be the iPhones,” he says.

Meanwhile, “”The scale of the problem is very small right now,” AP has stating, adding the school is working with Apple and Cisco Systems to pinpoint the problem.

“But the more iPhones that are around, the more they could be knocking on the door for access,” Cannon says.

Slashdot it!

Also See:
promotion triumph - Stanford U joins Apple sales, November 5, 2005
Associated Press - Duke: iPhone may be disrupting network, July 19, 2007
iPhone Matters - Phone (s?) Take Down Duke University Wireless Network?, July 18, 2007

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 7:05 am and is filed under WiFi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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