iPhones bedevil Duke

I'm on Duke's campus every day, iPhone in tow. Frankly I haven't noticed the wireless network crashing more than usual. But they always had address request problems, well before the iPhone was more than a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye. My laptop (first a ThinkPad, now a MBP) would get booted at least once a day because of address problems. Seems like they'd hand my device's address to another device, and boot me. (Actually, I haven't seen that happen since I got the MBP.)

I'm no network admin, so I don't know exactly what's going on here, but my money is on Duke's network being at fault.

I can't believe how many stories are on the net blaming this on the iPhone. Clearly it's a network problem. Like someone said, who lets their network fall victim to something like this. All the publicity simply shows that whoever runs the Duke network has screwed up.
Aside from that, why haven't we heard of this happening on the thousands of other wifi campuses around the country, corporate and academic?
Bad reporting

Gonna have to second the Cisco router problem. We use an older one here at work and my MacBook + Boss's HP lappy both have authentication issues. Our network guy says it has to with the way in which the router interacts with the wireless card which apparently does not maintain a steady connection but is almost in constant 'wireless refreshment'.
About the iPhone, he said that Apple may have done it to save power and extend battery life by having the wireless switching on and off whenever it is needed. Newer routers can handle it. Old ones can't.

I had this problem with Cisco routers in the Covention Center in Orlando, FL two years ago. They said my Powerbook had a short in the wireless card causing it to overload the wireless network.

A friend who works at Cisco told me to download iStumbler and see what system was being used. When I told him, he said that is a Cisco problem with certain routers and not my Powerbook's problem.

I suspect the same thing here.

Mine has the attrocious Perfigo (now Cisco) SmartEnforcer for Windows machine but a simple logon for Mac-based machines.

I need to re-log in every time because the login in web-based and not a simple password WEP or whatnot, unlike at work or home where it remembers it.

However, no issues at all here.

Even if there is a problem with the iPhone, what kind of network design is it that lets a client device affect it in this way?

Sean, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yesterday I contacted the network guy's at my local university, (I use to work there), and so far they've seen nothing. I also use to work at a local college and they to have seen nothing. Seems strange that only Duke would be seeing this, or at least reporting it. Obviously something is out of norm. Part of me wonders if someone didn't do a router software upgrade? or Apple is using some new communication standard that the old routers are not equipped to handle. Best have Cisco look at it as well, just in case!

I work at Cisco.

My iPhone hasn't crashed our network.

Hell, I can't even get onto the network with anything but my Cisco supplied laptop.... our network is harder to break into than Fort Knox.

This was posted on Slashdot yesterday, and the consensus among the IT-experienced commenters there was that this isn't an iPhone issue, it's a network issue. It's most likely the result of using old hardware to handle ARP requests from wireless devices. Their reasoning was that if it were really an issue with the iPhone, it would have been reported by more than one organization. If that's the case, it seems like Duke will have more to worry about than just iPhones if they don't fix the problem before August.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/16/232258

I wonder if this is what Cisco had in mind when they licenced the iPhone name to Apple in return for working together on interoperability...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6384875.stm

[)amien