As a user, stepping into a WiFi cloud is a great boon when you’ve been making do with dull old EDGE all day; as a network administrator, it might be that your nightmare is just about to start.  Duke University, which has a campus-wide wireless network, has been experiencing periodic outages thanks to a small number of iPhones flooding access points with MAC address requests.

So far, the problem has got admins stumped; in fact, they only realised Apple’s hardware was at fault when they grabbed some network traffic and analysed its origins.  A support request has been sent in to Apple themselves, but despite apparently being escalated there’s still no callback.  That leaves them to speculate on the possible cause, and so far the commonly fingered culprit seems to be the iPhone’s ability to automatically reconnect to previously used networks.

Right now, with school out for the Summer, it’s not so bad an issue, but if the network is still being hammered – up to 18,000 address requests per second, nearly 10Mbps of bandwidth, in attacks lasting 10 to 15 minutes – come the new academic year it could cause real problems.

[via Slashdot]