RALEIGH, N.C. - 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.
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. Network administrators have noticed the problem nine times in the past week.
"The scale of the problem is very small right now," said Cannon, adding that the school is working with Apple and Cisco Systems Inc., Duke's network equipment provider, to pinpoint the problem. "But the more iPhones that are around, the more they could be knocking on the door for access."
Ashok Agrawala, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, speculated that both the phone and Duke's network are to blame for the glitches at the university. Agrawala said the phones could be struggling to regain a connection with a wireless access point, possibly when a wireless hotspot hands off to another.
