The iPhone vs. Duke University: iPhone 1, Duke 0
Maybe the iPhones are jealous of the iPods. Maybe this is how Terminator 4 starts, in Durham, N.C., with a campus turf war between Apple handhelds. Duke University, the school that gave away iPods to its incoming freshman class of 2008 and that now sells iPods to any student that wants one for a bargain-busting $99 apiece, has recently seen its campus wireless routers afflicted with outages that may be due to what could essentially be described as an iPhone takeover.
According to an article by Jennifer Epstein that appeared in Inside Higher Ed, there have been at least nine incidents since last Friday where “as many as 30 of [the] university’s wireless routers have been knocked out of service for 10-minute intervals, after being flooded with as many as 18,000 requests per second that are believed to be coming from the iPhone’s built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi adapter” (“Is the iPhone Too Popular at Duke?,” July 18, 2007).
Campus Wireless on the Blink. Prime Suspect: iPhone
The service disruptions of Duke’s wireless network started two weeks after Apple released its iPhone on June 29, which has Duke’s Office of Information Technology speculating that spreading iPhones on campus are behind the outages. But this theory is still conjecture only, as the campus, along with Apple and Cisco Systems, the provider of Duke’s wireless routers, investigate the problem. “We don’t yet know whether this is an iPhone issue, a server issue or an issue between the server and the iPhone,” says Bill Cannon, the manager of news and information at the Office of Information Technology. “It’s not at all clear that it’s even iPhones, but we still think it probably is.”
A Hectic End of Summer for Duke’s Tech Staff
The Duke wireless predicament is still relatively minor, explains Epstein, with only “about 150 iPhones registered on the Duke network and many faculty and students off-campus for the summer.” But with the fall semester—and potentially hundreds more wireless-devouring iPhones—fast approaching, Duke’s tech specialists are scrambling to pinpoint and solve the problem before it spirals out of control and interferes with a bustling campus seeking to stay connected. “It’s not like the Wi-Fi is crashing,” says Cannon, “but we don’t want that to be the case—especially as the campus gets more crowded.” So while professors and students enjoy the final weeks of their summer vacation, Duke’s tech staff is, as Cannon tells Epstein, “too busy right now to be interviewed.”
Today, Duke. Tomorrow, the World?
Duke’s tech department hasn’t yet heard of other campuses experiencing similar wireless service disruptions, Epstein writes. The problem, at least for the time being, seems to be unique to Duke. So a skeleton campus waits for the Duke diagnosticians to get to the bottom of what, for right now, is still merely an annoyance. As for the rest of us? We can keep an eye on our iPhones. And if the wireless in your office, or at your school, or in your neighborhood starts crashing, start looking a little closer. Your iPhone might be trying to tell you something.
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