In an extremely ironic twist of fate, the wireless network at Duke University has been overwhelmed and crashed by an invasion of Apple
iPhones.
Apparently, the
iPhones are making massive numbers of MAC address requests (18,000 IP addresses per second or about 10Mbps in bandwidth), and the system can't cope, with as many as 30 nodes at a time reporting themselves “out of service” for 10~15 minutes per incident. During which time, the nodes are completely unresponsive to anything the network techs can do. They're guessing that it may be an issue with the way the
iPhones request the MAC addresses -- if they don't get an answer, they just ask again, and again, and ....
They're not too concerned just yet, as they're between semesters, so they've got a bit of time to resolve the problem, and are working with Cisco and Apple to that end. But if it's not resolved by the time the fall semester starts ... they seem to feel that would qualify as a "Bad Thing."
Source article available
here.